Fire service staff who visit residents’ homes in Lichfield and Burntwood to carry out safety checks could be given more training on how to spot mental health issues in older people.
Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service has teamed up with academics from Keele University for to examine how vulnerable residents could be helped to access support from other organisations.
The Fireside initiative will see interviews and focus group sessions held with the findings used to consider what further action can be taken to enable fire service staff to help residents.
Tamsin Fisher, a research associate at Keele University, told a meeting of the Staffordshire Health and Wellbeing Board:
“Staffordshire Fire Service staff commented on their daily exposure to mental ill-health – they are regularly visiting service users with anxiety, depression, bipolar, hoarding, Alzheimer’s and dementia to name a few conditions.
“One community safety officer spoke of a house with no heating and poor plumbing. The service user was sleeping in their car to keep warm and using a bottle to go to the toilet. He was living with severe depression and was known to many services, but due to hoarding other agencies were unable to access the property to help fix the broken heating and plumbing.
“Suicidal ideation was also a common theme among the focus groups. One of the staff members spoke of an occasion where a service user pulled out a blade during a visit and threatened to harm themselves.
“Another client spoke of his desire to die – he said he wasn’t going to eat and he wasn’t going to turn his heating on. He was living on a farm in the middle of nowhere and if he died that day it would have been weeks before he was discovered.”
Tamsin Fisher
During the year-long study around 20 Safe and Well home visits will be observed and recipients will be interviewed, adding to the information already gleaned from fire service staff.
“Across the country fire and rescue services are conducting home fire safety visits and the fire service are a well-respected emergency organisation. We’ve identified them as a non-traditional provider of care that could be used to help identify anxiety and depression in older adults.
“To better support their clients with mental illness fire service staff commented they would like to receive additional training around mental health. They expressed a need for training around communication techniques to ensure they were providing appropriate support to service users.
“The current Safe and Well form asks ‘are you depressed?’, but there is little guidance as to how to respond if somebody says yes.”
Tamsin Fisher
Carmel Warren, from Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service, said the organisation had welcomed the project.
She added:
“We hope it is going to allow us to have a better understanding of the communities we serve but also the impact of the visits to our staff when they carry out home fire risk checks.
“Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service are generally welcomed into people’s homes, where other services and agencies have problems getting through the threshold we don’t have that problem. We want to keep that trust.
“We’re also going to use the findings to help our own staff – we do offer our staff trauma risk management which is really important after somebody’s possibly passed away following a fatal fire, as well as any safeguarding issues they come across.”
Carmel Warren
