East Riding of Yorkshire Council – Lone Worker Safety

The East Riding team often work alone within the communities they serve. As they are mobile, visiting multiple sites in a typical day they require full monitoring of their daily activities and a reliable and proven escalation process should an accident or threatening situation develop whilst working alone.  

Staff were often challenged with working in high-risk environments which can range from dealing with people under the influence of substances, to working with tenants who experience mental illness. There are also times when difficult conversations need to take place, potentially over evictions, sanctions, warnings, or tenancies. These types of scenarios put certain members of the East Riding team in a particularly high-risk category. 

For these reasons, we were asked to deliver a lone working solution to provide safety and reassurance for their staff, so they are able to operate confidently within their daily roles. 

Team managers at the Council identified 4 key challenges that needed to be addressed: 

• Devices needed to be able to correctly identify each individual staff member 

• Establishing a management system to ensure accuracy of information 

• Rollout of training for users to ensure the best utilisation 

• Ensuring connectivity of devices for users at all times 

Training was essential for ensuring both staff and management were confident in both the devices and the security processes. Once we understood their requirements, we conducted a full assessment of the working environments and tasks performed by their staff, so that we fully understood and appreciated the challenges being faced. 

Once the assessment process was complete, we then developed a customised plan to deliver relevant training to all end users detailing how the technology works, why they are being provided with the solution, and how this will benefit each person as an individual. 

Management were also provided training and access to our Sentry customer portal, which gives real-time updates on individual staff usage, locations, user alerts and much more, giving them full oversight and the ability to download reports on a regular basis and quickly make any changes based on the information provided.

Technical briefings for key council staff were also undertaken by a member of the Orbis team for feedback opportunities regarding the service. 

To help combat poor signal in rural areas, we provided a roaming SIM which connected to whichever network has the strongest coverage at the time.