Working Alone - Are you at risk?
The risks involved in working alone or away from other work colleagues are recognised and well documented, but many companies are failing to meet the minimum health and safety requirements to protect their employees.
When there is no regular contact with lone workers, it is easy to see that a worker suffering a incapacitating illness or injury could be left without vital assistance for many hours or even days.
Are you a lone worker at risk? A lone worker is an employee who is isolated from trusted colleagues during any part of the working day and not necessarily alone. Home visits and meetings away from the office are examples of lone working where the main risk is violence. In the year 02/03 approximately 920,0001 violent incidents against employees at work were reported.
Without any lone worker procedures in place, preventable injuries and deaths can occur. If this happens, enforcement action and prosecutions can be brought against the company directors or managers responsible.
To implement an effective manual procedure for regular contact with lone workers can be difficult to achieve. Some employers therefore choose to ignore the issue completely and take a chance with their lone workers health and safety. This attitude is not acceptable but is understandable when you consider the time, effort and money required to implement and follow a manual process, just in case an “unlikely”2 event occurs.
Employers are also aware that any manual process will always be prone to human error, which can have dire consequences where a workers safety is involved. Consider a scenario where a supervisor receives regular contact calls from lone workers, any error, misunderstanding or misplaced paperwork could lead to no action being taken when urgent assistance is required.
Previous prosecution cases show that incidents will occur where lone workers suffer injury or death because their employer failed to meet their duty of care under the Heath & Safety at Work etc Act 1974 and The Management of Health and Safety at work Regulations 1999.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) produce guidelines for lone workers, the free leaflet “Working Alone in Safety” is available from www.hse.gov.uk3
With new technology and the popularity of mobile phones, there is now an opportunity for companies and individuals to benefit from reliable and cost effective lone worker monitoring solutions that can automate processing of lone worker contacts, overdue contacts and emergency alarms. These systems can allow supervisors to view lists of lone workers showing their current status and location. Remote workers can update information such as location and time required from a standard mobile phone.
There are a number of systems now available, more details can be found by searching for “lone worker” on the internet. An intuitive solution to lone worker monitoring called Easy-Link4 - www.easy-link.net has made use of mobile phone text messages as a means to update information, allows a mobile phone to be used as a panic alarm and can report the workers location on a map.
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-Notes for editors-
1: Source: 2002/03 British Crime Survey
2: Violence at work only (no figures available for lone worker accidents and illness) 2002/03 British Crime Survey – 1,700 per 100,000 workers (1.7%) reported a violent incident (threat or assault).
3: Download in PDF format is currently available from http://www.hse.gov.uk/contact/faqs/workalone.htm
4: Here at CABell Ltd we have created a web based lone worker monitoring solution called Easy-Link - www.easy-link.net. We are looking for companies to take up a free trial of our service, so they can understand how new technology has opened the way to improved protection for vulnerable employees.
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