The mental image of evacuation is everyone out of the building and onto the car park. In a care home that is not the plan and never was. The plan is progressive horizontal evacuation. You move people through a fire-resisting wall into the next compartment and hold them there. Some residents cannot walk. Some cannot be moved quickly at all. A full building evacuation down a stair is not a realistic strategy, and the guidance has stopped pretending otherwise.
So the whole weight of the strategy sits on the compartment line. Not on the stair, not on the fire service, on the wall and the floor and everything that crosses them.
What I would want anyone specifying these buildings to think about is the route that goes around the wall rather than through it. A ventilated facade cavity runs the full height of the elevation and it does not care where your compartment walls are. If it is open, you have a path from one compartment to the next that none of your internal detailing touches.
Above 18m the regulation makes you deal with it. Below 18m, which is nearly every care home in the country, it does not. That is the gap, and closing it is a specification decision rather than a compliance one.
My view is that where the strategy assumes people stay where they are, the facade should be treated as part of the compartmentation, whatever the height of the building. Test evidence and datasheets for our ventilated cavity fire barriers are in the Technical Hub.