The trade body the British Security Industry Association (BSIA) has published revisions to two of its lone worker guides. The revisions have been made to Form 144 – A Guide to Buying a Lone Worker Service and Form 288 – Lone Workers – An Employer’s Guide, to reflect recent changes in the Lone Worker services market.
They provide end users with advice on how to go about procuring a lone worker service; and detail employer responsibilities towards their lone workers as well what they should expect from a lone worker device, its supplier, an alarm receiving centre and the response.
Steve Lampett, Technical Officer at the BSIA says: “The BSIA’s Lone Worker Section decided to update these very useful guides to reflect changes within the Lone Worker services market. Whilst many of these changes are minor routine amendments, educating the marketplace is a key objective of the Association and so ensuring industry guidance is up to date is of vital importance.”
Amendments to the guides include:
Form 288 – Lone Workers – an employer’s guide:
Changes from BS 8484:2009 to BS 8484:2011.
Addition of the provision for using the services of BS 8591 Category 2 Alarm Receiving Centres (ARCs).
Health and Safety Executive guidance updates.
Reflecting the name change of the Association of Chief Police Officers by replacing it with the National Police Chiefs’ Council.
Form 144 – A guide to buying lone worker devices:
Reflection of the new requirement placed on the supplier highlighting the need to be flexible in terms of alarm escalation contacts – including at different times of the day/week, escalation and prioritisation processes.
Inclusion of a greater emphasis on the supplier to provide ongoing training options for the customer.
Craig Swallow, pictured, the chairman of the BSIA’s Lone Worker section, adds: “We wanted to ensure that our guidance remains up to date and continues to be useful for end-users to refer to when procuring a lone worker service. The section therefore felt it necessary to update both Form 144 and 288. We expect further changes will need to be made to these forms and other BSIA lone worker publications when the current revision of BS 8484 has been completed in 2016.”
The updated versions are available to download free from the BSIA’s website: www.bsia.co.uk.
