Reliance High-Tech, which offers the Reliance Protect lone worker service, is introducing a new welfare check for lone workers entering high-risk situations.
The company says that it developed it with a UK retailer, looking at lone worker safety for field-based engineers. They can be working in areas without mobile phone overage. The challenge was to enable alarms to be initiated and responded to by the 24-7 Reliance Monitoring Centre in those areas.
This new feature developed for the Identicom range of devices uses three extra buttons on the front face of the device. The new service enables lone workers to ‘check in’ with the monitoring centre before entering high risk situations and/or areas of unreliable mobile coverage, and ‘check out’ once they are away. ‘Checked in’ users are flagged in the monitoring centre as at a higher risk status. If the user doesn’t ‘check out’ to cancel their heightened risk status within a set time, an alert is automatically activated, triggering a pre-agreed alert escalation process that is initiated and managed through to resolution.
This new feature complements the man-down function, to help mitigate the risks associated with slips, trips, falls, and incapacity due to illness and accidents, the product firm says. It’s suited it’s claimed to engineers, maintenance and utilities staff who need to carry out tasks in basements, roofs or at a power sub-station. It can also be used for wider mobile, field based staff applications for checking in and out at the start and end of working shifts.
After trials, the welfare check is now available as part of the Reliance Protect service. That combines the GSM and GPS enabled Identicom ID badge protection devices with a monitoring and response service managed by the Reliance Monitoring Centre.
Chris Allcard, Head of Lone Worker Services at Reliance High-Tech, said: “We developed the welfare check that combines a more effective alert and response mechanism with an extra layer of safety for lone workers in situations with unreliable network coverage. The service supports the needs of an increasingly mobile, 24-7 workforce with employees who may be on the road or in the field for much of their working day. This new feature clearly demonstrates our approach and commitment to working in partnership with clients to identify and develop new service features to enhance staff safety. This particular feature was scoped, developed and successfully tested in a matter of weeks.”
Reliance Protect as the single supplier for the delivery of the national NHS Lone Worker Framework has held that contract since 2009. Visit www.relianceprotect.co.uk.
