Following a very successful pilot, Suffolk County Council has decided to extend its contract with C3, suppliers of Lookout Call, for a further two years.
The lone worker safety system is being used by more than 400 staff across the Council, including 100 social workers. Staff from education, environmental, trading standards and racial harassment departments are also benefiting from Lookout Call, which supports the risk assessment process.
Why Lookout Call? The council decided to look into using an automated lone worker alarm system following the National Task Force Initiative on Violence against Social Care Staff set up by Frank Dobson, then Secretary of State for Health, to look at incidences of violence against lone workers”. Until that point the Council had been handling lone worker protection using a manual solution.
A full risk assessment was carried out by Suffolk County Council and a tender of requirements was sent to eight different organisations.
Lookout Call was chosen because of its flexibility to be customised to meet very specific requirements stipulated by the council. They were very concerned about security and confidentiality so Lookout Call was customised to allow multi-level security. Suffolk County Council also needed Lookout Call to be made available for the hard of hearing, and to achieve this it was simply adapted to work via PDA’s or GPRS-enabled mobile phones to allow updates to be made via the Internet.
“We are very pleased with how Lookout Call works,” says Robin Guy, Head of Risk at Suffolk County Council. “We gave our staff a great deal of support and training during the implementation process and the Lookout Call lone worker alarm gives them confidence, knowing that an alarm will be raised if an incident occurs.”