What type of work will they be doing?

We have looked at this stuff for several years. (We have 200 plus peripatetic staff working in ports, airports, farms and forestry). Currently we rely on operational systems to keep track of who is where and if they are safe. The use of this approach relies on the staff actually doing the bit and notifying people of where they are going, which some staff fail to do. We have looked at the sort of devices that you have mentioned and it is possible to create something using a standard mobile phone (We had a demo from our mobile supplier on this recently). The two problems with this are, firstly their coverage is not always very good away from built up areas and secondly what you do once you have established someone is missing/in trouble. You cannot just phone the police and say “one of my employees is missing/in trouble.” The police are wary of going off on wild goose chases and they expect you prove that the person is in trouble not just sloped off to the pub. One of the advantages of using one of the commercial monitored systems is that they have an arrangement with the police which means if the company contacts the police, the police will respond. Of course for that you will have to pay extra. Another problem, which you won’t have in Ireland, is that we are still not sure which police force to contact if one of our staff goes missing. Should it be our local force or one the forces (our main “patches” are covered by at least 6 force areas) where our staff might be.

Katie If you have site security while the cleaner is working, get them to make regular contact say once every 30min to check the cleaner is OK. If you want to go down a technology route radios that automatically alarm to a base station if someone goes horizontal for 30 secs are available. We had them on our landfill site. That might suffice, once again if you have a security presence on site. I apologise I cannot remember the brand of radio but they were about £115. No doubt you have a radio supplier in your local area. Kind regards Jeff

Hi Do your staff have modern phones, try the b-safe app

I have used these also in the food industry. http://www.doro.co.uk/pr...o-handleplus-334gsm-iup/ Not expensive at all and very easy to use. found them to be a good solution.

Thanks again for all your advice. Katie