Monitoring Lone Workers helps you comply with Health & Safety
Why monitoring lone workers helps companies comply with Health and Safety legislation
Under Health and Safety At Work Regulations (1999), employers have specific duties towards lone
workers. These are stated in the Health and Safety Executive Guidelines document INDG73rev2. Go
to http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg73.pdf to download a copy.
Many companies have chosen to focus on only one element of these duties; the provision of a panic
alarm. Whilst it is a good thing that they are doing something rather than nothing, they can do much
more with Romex.
Firstly, Romex gets around the biggest problem with panic alarms - which is they cannot get a GPS fix
inside most buildings. This is because the signal from the GPS satellites gets blocked easily by walls
and roofs. So if an employee is inside when they trigger an alert it is very unlikely that they can be
located.
As a result, most up-to-date panic alarms also use LBS to get a location as a fall-back. LBS is based
on triangulating a position from the mobile phone masts but even in densely populated areas (where
there are lots of masts) it is normally only accurate to +/- 200 metres, whereas GPS is accurate to +/
- 5 metres. In other words, you will know the employee is somewhere in 400 metre diameter area
which, in a city centre (like the West End or The City) could contain hundreds of buildings. Clearly,
this is not a great deal of help if you are trying to direct an ambulance to an unconscious employee.
With Romex, the employee is tracked using GPS all the time so you will probably be able to see
exactly which building the employee went in to. This means that if an employee triggers a Romex
panic alarm (which uses GPS and LBS) you will have a far better chance of locating them than you
would with a ‘stand alone’ panic alarm.
Secondly, INDG73rev2 states that there should be “checks to ensure a lone worker has returned to
their base or home once their task is completed”. With Romex, employers have real-time visibility
in the office of where employees are backed up with Romex’s unique Work Status colour coding
of employee icons. Using the employee and movement icons, it is clear when an employee is not
where they should be or has been somewhere too long. For example, if the employee icon is Yellow,
showing they are still at a work location but outside their working hours, this could be an indicator of
a potential problem.
So if you want to keep your employees safe, and, therefore, comply with Health and Safety
legislation, the best way is to know where they are at all times.