At least annually or more frequently as determined by your fire risk assessment- if you have a high staff turnover you may need to carry them out more often. All staff on all shifts should be involved once per year.
Practice fire drills should be carried out to check that:-
• Staff understand the emergency fire action plan (including all relevant personal evacuation needs).
• To ensure that staff are familiar with operation of the emergency fire action plan.
• To evaluate effectiveness of the plan and to identify any weaknesses in the evacuation strategy.
To achieve this the drill needs to be monitored by key staff to look for any problems. The details should be recorded - who took part, how long the evacuation took, any problems encountered. It may be usefull to call the fire brigade control room before the drill just in case they get an unintentional 999 call from a member of staff on hearing the fire alarm.
