East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust (ESHT) has been working over the last year to introduce a new solution to protect their higher risk lone working groups.

The introduction of Peoplesafe gives lone working colleagues a personal safety device on their lanyard or an lone working app on their phone, which they can use to send an alert to Peoplesafe’s Alarm Receiving Centre (ARC) if they have any concerns for their safety. Any alerts received are assessed and escalated by the ARC, which is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

The project to introduce Peoplesafe was focussed on those teams identified as higher risk lone working groups and to date, over 40 teams (totalling 884 members of staff who work in the community) are using the system.

Getting teams set up was simple, with managers asked to provide details for their staff, devices were then sent with users simply needing to charge the device, complete the eLearning (which was tailored specifically to ESHT) and then switch on the device ready for use. The user was then sent a text with their unique log in details, which they input to the app.

Ensuring that our high risk lone working groups have a system in place to keep them safe is obviously really important and it’s great that we’ve been able to introduce Peoplesafe to do this. Working on this during the pandemic has brought particular challenges, but I’d like to thank the managers and their teams who’ve engaged with the project and also Peoplesafe, who have been really accommodating and made sure that the system they’ve provided us with is tailored specifically to our needs.

Although the project has come to an end, we’re still working closely with Peoplesafe with regular meetings to look at further improvements. These include giving managers access to the portal so they can oversee their team’s data and usage alongside the scheduled reporting. - Hollie Austin, Digital Request Fulfilment Lead, ESHT Digital