subject: Mobile Phone Tracking Helps Reduce The Risk To Lone Workers [print this page] Mobile Phone Tracking Helps Reduce The Risk To Lone Workers
In many countries, the respective Health and Safety organisations are helping businesses with best practice guidelines for the management of the risks of lone working. For example, the UK's HSE has released it's guidance in the form of a 'Working Alone' advice leaflet INDG73(rev2).
This document provides employers with best practice guidelines on how to keep their lone working environment as safe as practicable. Whilst the advice and guidance in this document is not mandatory, it is intended to help employers understand what they need to do to meet with their legal duties towards lone workers under the UK Health and Safety regulations.
A key point to note in almost all regulation is that it is clearly the employer's duty to assess the risks that lone workers may face and take steps to avoid or control risks where necessary. Lone workers include people who work both in fixed establishments as well as staff working away from a regular base.
Examples of people working in a fixed establishment include those working in small shops, working at home, or in isolated parts of a large building (including working out of normal hours).
People working away from a fixed base include workers involved in construction, plant installation, maintenance and cleaning work, as well as service workers such as social workers, health care professionals, drivers, sales representatives etc.
When compiling a risk assessment, common examples of hazards are "violence and threatening behaviour" and "working alone". At the minimum, we might expect to see that an employer has issued a mobile phone to the employee so that they may summon help in the event that they do not have access to a landline. However, this is not necessarily always sufficient, and when reviewing what further action may be necessary, the next level of protection is often to consider providing a panic alarm facility. To be worthwhile in the event of an emergency, a panic alarm must not only be capable of alerting an employee's supervisors, but also needs to be simple to activate, and also sending the employer an accurate position fix as an integral part of the alarm notification.Now there are a range of different devices that are able to meet this requirement.On the one hand, the lone worker could be provided with a standard mobile phone with an in-built GPS mobile phone tracking capability, running some tracking software that turns it into a GPS tracking device.Alternatively, a dedicated lone-worker tracking unit designed for the purpose may be more appropriate. Typically, these units are simple to operate and provide limited mobile voice calling capabilities, for example to a small number of pre-programmed numbers, as well as a panic alarm button.For employees that need a mobile phone anyway to carry out their work, then the first alternative makes a great deal of sense, whereas for employees that should only ever need to contact a couple of phone numbers, then a dedicated lone worker tracking device will provide everything that the employer needs to manage their risk, without the risk that the employee may abuse the privilege of having a fully functional phone.
