Feature
Protecting Employees In High-Risk Environments
For any business, ensuring the health and safety of its employees should be the number one priority – what is more, it’s a legal requirement. This is especially true when a company has employees that need to work alone. Whether it be in construction, healthcare or the public sector, lone workers face unique risks and challenges that those working in a team often don’t experience. Therefore, proactive steps must be taken to address them.
By implementing clear safety protocols and through using modern alarm systems, companies can greatly enhance the security and well-being of their lone workers. This not only safeguards the employees but also helps reduce potential liabilities for the company.
However, ensuring that lone workers have the right equipment and processes in place – such as a handset or device that is capable of triggering an alarm in the first place – is important to deploy to protect employees. Chris Potts, Marketing Director, ANT Telecom explains.
Triggering The Alarm
Lone worker alarms offer a way of notifying people within an organisation that an incident to a lone worker has occurred and that support is required. However, to set off an alarm in the first place, workers must carry some form of handset or device that is capable of triggering alarms. There are many handsets that come in different sizes for employees to use: including wearable, dual-purpose, man-down, WiFi and those that don’t rely on 2G, 4G mobile networks. These options must all be considered when deploying an effective solution – additionally, organisations must consider how response teams will manage each alarm too.
Light And Sounder Alarms
Light and Sounder Alarm alarms are great for anyone working in noisy or remote environments, where visual or audible alarms are the best way to capture attention.
They are commonly used on manufacturing sites alongside lone worker handsets or devices. When an incident takes place, a worker either presses their SOS button or their man-down feature on their lone worker handset. Typically, this activates and triggers the light and sounder alarm. However, while these alarms are great at making people aware of an incident, they do have their limitations. One of the biggest draw backs is the lack of information provided by the alarm. This is a problem if you have multiple lone workers on a site, as it doesn’t reveal who triggered the alarm or where the person is located. But, it does provide a general alarm for all to hear, see and respond to.
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Therefore, to overcome this challenge, separate ‘sounders’ could be installed for each lone worker with them clearly labelled. But, even with 10 or more lone workers the management of this could start to become more complicated and cluttered. Furthermore, if an incident occurred, it would mean that responders would have to walk to the sounder first to discover who triggered it, which is far from ideal.
When using this solution, its recommended that organisations implement a lone worker procedure and that they train workers on how to respond and manage this type of alarm – you certainly don’t want staff to stand and just watch when the alarm goes off.
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