Essex County Council protecting lone workers from trading standards officers to isolated librarians

1 Jan 2018

Essex County Council (ECC) selected Lone Worker Solutions and strategic partner Mitie, the facilities management giant, to protect team members when they are working alone or out-of-sight of colleagues. ECC is one of the UK's biggest councils employing approximately 9,000 staff. Council services include education, social care, waste and recycling, transport and highways, libraries, and leisure and tourism.  Many of the staff who deliver these services work by themselves or out-of-sight of colleagues and can be in challenging customer facing roles.

ECC has lone workers in many departments. Roles with a particularly high-risk profile include those where staff work directly with residents and businesses such as trading standards officers, social workers, park wardens, officers who make site visits and even librarians in some of the smaller facilities across the county. Many of these team members are often in isolated locations, using potentially hazardous machinery or facing aggressive and violent behaviour from the public. The council identified all the staff roles that included a lone-working component, conducted a risk assessment, and established a health and safety profile for each one.

"Protection systems like this can't prevent a problem from occurring. But when something goes wrong, it is comforting for staff to know that if they press the button, someone will be listening; they know that you are in trouble, and they know where you are." Garry Fisher Corporate Health and Safety Manager, Essex County Council

SOS Fob to the rescue Lone Worker Solutions selected the SOS Fob as the best fit for ECC staff who wanted a discreet device. SOS Fob is small and can be carried in a pocket or worn on a specially developed identification badge holder, produced on demand via 3D printing.

All workers identified as high-risk have a dedicated device. However, many staff in low-risk roles, or who work alone occasionally, are allowed to share. Although many suppliers don't support device-sharing, an advanced feature of Safe Hub is that each team member has a bespoke profile which can be ‘ported' across to any device in a matter of minutes.

Smartphone app Along with the SOS Fob, we provided access to Safe Hub on our advanced smartphone app, so employees who don't want to carry an extra device are still fully protected. Safe Hub is the leading app system when it comes to providing support on PCs, all mobile handsets, BlackBerry devices, all smartphones (the system works seamlessly on Android, iOS and Windows) and Android smartwatches.