The charity Macmillan Cancer Support has a lone worker product for their staff and volunteers; a personal safety mobile phone app.
Volunteers can often do lone working including time in the homes of people affected by cancer. Macmillan sought a central and consistent way of ensuring the safety of their lone working volunteers. Chris Badman from Macmillan says: “Our aim is to grow our volunteer base from around 70 volunteers supporting people in their own homes to 2000 by 2016. Buddy schemes aren’t as reliable as we’d like and we needed something more robust in place to cover our Duty of Care as an organisation and to allow our paid staff to do their main job without worrying about the well-being of volunteers in the community.”
Macmillan opted for Guardian24’s lone worker product via the volunteers’ mobile phones. The app allows the lone worker or volunteer to log into the system before each home visit, giving details of the address, who they are going to meet and the expected duration. If their activity overruns Guardian24 will automatically call the worker to verify their safety. If the worker cannot be reached Guardian24’s Alarm Receiving Centre will be notified informing them of the overrun. An agreed protocol will be followed to verify user safety and location.
Should the lone worker feel unsafe, they also have access to a dedicated panic button on their phones which will raise a panic alert, even if they have not logged a lone worker activity.
Macmillan paid staff are freed from checking where volunteers are. Macmillan started off with a small project and have continued to roll it out, with training. Visit www.guardian24.co.uk.
