Best known for their ambulance service, charitable healthcare organization, St John, also employ a team of medical alarm representatives in New Zealand, who install, test and monitor emergency medical alarms for 40,000 vulnerable or elderly customers.
Prior to launching StaySafe, representatives would call the St John medical alarm monitoring teams to let them know where they were, or use their digital calendar to record their location. However, as part of a lone worker policy review, St John discovered that many employees were not consistently recording their location or checking in. This was an issue as most customers are not well known by the representative and they usually work alone, potentially putting them at risk. St John also realized that employees would often leave their phones in the car, making it even more difficult to signal for help if they needed it.
The StaySafe app and Hub allows St John to monitor their lone workers and take immediate action if an alert is triggered. By integrating the StaySafe Hub with existing technology, monitoring of the medical alarm systems and lone working representatives, can be carried out by the same person on adjacent screens.
“The app and Hub are intuitive and easy to use with a great range of functions and alerts. The fact that employees start and end their own sessions has also gone down well as staff are in control of when they are being monitored rather than feeling we are tracking them intrusively. We launched StaySafe to our employees at our annual conference and ran workshops on practical lone worker safety so our employees understood how the app fits in with taking a common sense approach to safety. The StaySafe team offered lots of support to get up and running and let us take the set up
process at our own pace. Our employees feel that we have taken some really positive steps to protect them and I would certainly recommend StaySafe to others in our position.”
– Nick Coley, Head of Telecare at St John National Headquarters, New Zealand