Hi All,

It's the first time i've ever posted on here but need some advice re First Aid during Covid times. We are the FM company looking after a large Client, most of their team are going to continue to work from home for some months and some of our staff will continue working from home as well. Those that are go into the office are doing so under a rota system meaning that it can never be guaranteed that there will be continuity of first aid cover on the sites.  We are going down the route of Appointed Persons for first aid where we can however we could have the scenario of one of our team members being on site on their own meaning lone working.

Does anyone else have this situation?

I am going to put together a training piece stating about lack of first aid cover, ensuring you know where your first aid box is located and I am also going to put in a process of Line Manager contact at certain points throughout the day.

Is there anything else we could do to make the procedures more robust?

Thanks in advance

Hey thanks for your response.  I would have felt the same about the "lighter touch" had I have not experienced a nasty situation on a site where a person died.  She didn't have an accident she had a massive heart attack but had managed to dial the onsite ambulance service but couldn't manage to give the full location of where she was and she was totally alone.  People can be taken really sick at any given moment and if there is no one on site except them then we need to ensure sickness as well as accidents is covered in our lone working procedures so for me for frequent contact is a must.

Originally Posted by: achrn

We are doing the same as you already have set up. We have well below 10% of normal staff levels going into the office, and it doesn’t reliably include the trained first aiders, so we have a designated appointed person each day, which varies depending upon who is in, and is announced with a notice at the sign-in book.  The Covid arrangements document identifies this arrangement to staff (anyone going in has to acknowledge receipt of that document and an undertaking to comply with it).

The 'working alone' scenario is no different to any other working alone situation (though for us, safer than the scenarios our working alone procedures are set up for - you're safer working alone in the office than you are on the side of a railway, for example). Where we have someone who is alone in an office all day we are using similar but slightly lighter processes to our normal working alone – that person notifies someone else when they leave for the day. Given the low hazards in our office we are not mandating a periodic check-in.

Interesting conversation, I am not saying you're right or wrong, you can't eliminate the risk I totally agree but by having more stringent control measures in place as in phoning more regularly we would increase the chances of survival possibly, but I definitely see where you're coming from with the home working piece.  I don't think one answer fits all here to be honest.

Originally Posted by: achrn

Originally Posted by: harley1

People can be taken really sick at any given moment and if there is no one on site except them then we need to ensure sickness as well as accidents is covered in our lone working procedures so for me for frequent contact is a must.

Yes they can, but phoning every couple of hours (or every hour, or every 30 minutes) doesn't eliminate risk of dying from heart attack (even if it was my job to eliminate all risk), and in my opinion doesn't significantly reduce the risks. It therefore doesn't meet the cost / benefit threshold to mandate it whenever someone is in the office alone, in my assessment.

People can be taken really sick working at home alone - is everyone in your business phoning everyone else every hour?  What do you actually do if they don't phone in at their 10:00 check-in?

You could always spend a fortune on "down" detectors for everyone entering the office but then you still have the issue that if it is one person, and they have that heart attack would anyone be able to get to them in time?

As a technological solution you then start adding to your woes looking at all the just in case scenarios - the battery fails, the transmitter they are carrying is in a "not spot" within the building, the phone network goes down (if it uses mobile signal), all the ambulances and paramedics are at a major incident on the other side of town......

Even timed contact does not work - they could keel over just after the supervisors contact call.

Personally I think you are doing enough.

It's usual when someone has died to feel "if only I had done something different."  This is a feeling that occurs even when there was nothing at all that anyone could have done to prevent it.  Having that feeling doesn't necessarily mean you should start doing something different. Only an objective analysis would lead to that conclusion.

It's also so easy to become sensitised to an issue when you have encountered such a bad outcome from it.  While that does mean you are more likely to spot things that are wrong in relation to that issue, it can also make it difficult to keep it in proportion.  I think it's important to recognise these feelings, then put them aside and consider the issue objectively - which is exactly what I think you are trying to do here.

As achrn eluded you can keep going at an issue wasting ever more resources - there is a time though when the conclusion has to be "I/we have done what is reasonably practicable".

For limited office occupancy telling people where the plasters can be found, how to report an incident and who to tell if the First Aid supplies have gone walkies is more than enough.

The nature and number of reports to date would be justification of a commensurate decision.