Written notes during fire risk assessment

[memnon]

Just a quickie,
A company I work for is considering using Dictaphones for the risk assessment, uploading then to a template and bobs your uncle. (not quite as simple as that)
Im curious that we may be leaving our self open to issues later if there are no written (contemporaneous notes).
Your thoughts please.

[lyledunn]

I am sure that they can still be suitable and sufficient when recorded as proposed. Might not be so easy to communicate to other interested parties like insurance providers, licensing authorities, building control etc. Nonetheless, there is nowt wrong with trying new ways of doing things.

[DavyFire]

Hi,
   On a related issue.
Last week I had a discussion with other Fire Risk Assessors on how long to keep records of inspections. I have a small forest of stored notes and inspection reports from years gone by. The consensus was to keep for seven years, similar to tax records etc.
Any views out there?

Davy

[AnthonyB]

BAFE require 7 years, we scan and store notes and plans on a server, it's bad enough with your own notes, but when you have loads of  consultant's notes stacking up it's problematic.

They won't budge even if in some cases a report would have been superseded 6 times before disposal of notes was allowed.

[Fire Monkey]

Generally everything I write down ends up in the final assessment (which is recorded and stored electronically) - my view point being if anything was worthy of a note it is worthy of being in the assessment. Take the view of the FRA being a story and all of the information feeds into the history of the building and its occupants. The idea though of a 'Building Passport' could be the place though to keep interesting but not immediately note worthy or relevant information.

[Stephen1974]

Just resurrecting this one slightly.

I recently downloaded a speech to text app so I could make notes as I walked around and honestly, its a great idea. I'm only using a free one at the moment so it has limited application and really is just for notes, but i'm sure someone could (or maybe has) designed a template version that would allow you to fill out an entire risk assessment verbaly and then print it off as a document.

Anyone know if something like that does exist yet?