To alleviate the risk to its lone working maintenance team, Circle Housing Property Services has introduced personal safety devices. The product in use is MySOS Mandown, developed exclusively by Skyguard.
Circle Housing Property Services (CHPS) are an in-house property maintenance team providing services to Circle Housing’s regional providers. Employing around 115 lone working tradesmen presented a risk of workplace injury or assault. Not only are the tradesman often working from heights but regularly carry out tasks alone.
The personal safety alarms feature GPS, GPRS and Mandown technologies. Certified to the British Standard BS 8484 for lone worker management, and Secured by Design, the alarm is carried on the person. With two-way audio, it provides lone workers with a way to call for help in an emergency. When the user raises the alarm, an alert is sent to Skyguard’s Incident Management Centre (IMC), with the GPS location of the device. A controller at the IMC will first listen in and assess, before talking to the user and taking action. Favoured largely by CHPS was the devices’ ‘mandown’ function, automatically raising an alarm in the event of a fall or sudden impact.
Mark Perkins, CHPS Health and Safety Manager says: “The tradesmen now have confidence that they have support available to them at all times, even during out of hours call-outs.” The system previously adopted by CHPS had proved unreliable, Mark added: “We used to have a phone-in system for lone worker protection but this was complicated and cumbersome, and because of those factors it was not always used correctly. The direct access to the emergency services control rooms was a very important factor when deciding to purchase the Skyguard service.”
Having met with Skyguard for a demonstration of the MySOS personal alarms, CHPS proceeded to roll out 120 devices. Mark said: “The training and support that we received during the roll-out process was very professional, and any questions we had were answered promptly by the support team. The response received to activation calls and accidental man down alarms has been fast and accurate which gives confidence in the support offered should there be a genuine incident. The availability of voice recordings for evidential purposes and the flexibility offered by the online portal were influential in our decision process. I would certainly recommend Skyguard to other organisations, the customer support we have received has been excellent and the product has performed exactly as described”.
About Skyguard
Visit www.skyguardgroup.com. In August 2011, Skyguard launched an emergency response service operating in 36 countries across Europe, the Russian Federation and South Africa. Skyguard is a subsidiary of the Send For Help Group – a lone worker protection provide; visit www.sendforhelp.co.uk.
