A fire blanket and a foam extinguisher are affordable to buy, and ideally they should be within easy reach in every home. Quick action can prevent injuries, but property damage still occurs whenever flames and smoke are produced.
Care professionals know that attempting initial fire extinguishing is beyond the abilities of an older person or someone with dementia and can even be life-threatening. Escaping quickly can save lives, but when toxic smoke begins to form, there is no time to lose. The best advice is to leave the apartment as quickly as possible, although even that can be difficult for a person with limited functional ability.
The same applies to sprinkler systems: they can extinguish a fire if the resident cannot, but they also leave a considerable mess behind.
Pros and cons of initial firefighting equipment for older people and people with dementia
Pros of initial firefighting equipment
- A fire blanket and a hand-held extinguisher are affordable to buy.
- They can also be used to extinguish other fires, such as those started by candles or fireplaces.
Cons of initial firefighting equipment
- An older person may have weak initial firefighting skills even if they are otherwise functional when the fire starts. You cannot expect them to use extinguishing equipment quickly, effectively and correctly when flames appear. The best advice is to leave the apartment as quickly as possible.
- A hand-held extinguisher leaves a major mess behind.
- A sprinkler is activated only when flames and smoke are already substantial. Major property damage is a reality even if the fire is suppressed. A stove guard could prevent a large share of sprinkler activations because dangerous situations on the stove would not progress to a fire.
- A fire suppression system is expensive to retrofit.
A Safera stove guard prevents a fire from igniting regardless of the resident's functional ability and therefore also suits people with limited functional ability
A stove guard also suits a person with dementia because using it does not require learning anything new, and it can be installed on an existing stove that is already familiar to the user.
Safera stove guard monitors the stove temperature throughout cooking and detects movement, or the lack of it, around the stove. It stops a rapidly escalating dangerous situation by cutting off the power to the stove before a stove fire ignites, regardless of what the resident does.
If necessary, the stove guard can also send an alert to a caregiver's phone so that the older person's functional ability can be checked.
By preventing the fire from igniting, a stove guard significantly improves the chances that a person with limited functional ability can get through the situation with no more than a fright. Even then, many people in this group have difficulty getting out of the apartment on their own, as the Finnish National Rescue Association points out:
"In Sweden, it has been observed that after 10 minutes, people's chances of escaping decrease significantly if they have not been able to leave the apartment on their own."
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