National review of community risk methodology across UK Fire and Rescue Service

Infrastructure

The development and housing of a compendium of evaluation methodologies for the UK FRS. This would enable each UK FRS to evaluate their own delivery of the prevention and protection work with their own communities in a timely manner that can withstand scrutiny. By developing an infrastructure to share evaluation methodologies, it enables FRSs to learn nation-wide. These should include both evidence-based good practice where methodologies are effective in evaluating the work, but also detail the activities that have proven effective in addressing an identified risk and also activities that were trialled and proven ineffective. By including both successful and unsuccessful activities and the reasons why, this would enable FRSs to judge if they have similar barriers to success, or if it would be a different context to trial the unsuccessful activity/intervention/event. This would provide a greater evidence base to direct resource efficiently and effectively. Such dissemination will be aided through the development of NOG, but would be facilitated through face-to-face dissemination of practice, where services can learn and develop from one another through presentations and discussions. Inviting academic partners to disseminate findings from academic research would also enable NFCC to better integrate current evidence. We suggest an annual conference of good practice and skill development alongside a dedicated web resource where a compendium of good practice could be developed.

Individual FRSs

Bespoke evaluations should be conducted alongside all prevention and protection activities to ensure that all activities conducted are making good use of available resource. Evaluations should consider if using control conditions is appropriate and if control conditions are appropriate measuring relevant factors to effectively evaluate the value of the activity. Working with academic partners may support the development of robust bespoke evaluations, but using and developing existing expertise in the services to build robust, sustainable evaluation frameworks is strongly encouraged.

Continuous evaluation

Even where activities already have an existing evidence-base, it is important to continuously evaluate effectiveness. This is to best understand when particular activities are effective, and also to enable a continuously updating picture of effectiveness. That is, as the nature of society changes, those practices which once were effective may become less effective. It is therefore necessary to maintain an up-to-date picture of what activities are effective for which groups, and when these are effective.