Pedigree

Our 24/7/365 in-house ARC has been monitoring lone workers with a variety of devices and apps for many years.  Our unique combination of alarm handling staff skills and expertise, mature and robust processes and systems, standards accreditation, performance levels and resilience of service were major factors in the Department of Health awarding Reliance Protect the contract as single supplier to deploy 30,000 personal safety devices to frontline community-based NHS staff in 2009.

Standards

Our ARC is accredited to all the key standards to ensure the highest levels of quality, performance and service resilience.

BS8484 Lone Worker Code Of Practice is the key standard here.  Accreditation enables us to fast track a Police Level 1 response (where situations warrant such a response), bypassing the traditional public facing 999 and 101 routes.  We were instrumental in the creation of BS8484 and one of the first to be accredited when it was launched in 2009.

We are one of the first ARCs in the UK to gain Echo Connected status. ECHO is an alarm transfer service facilitating greater effectiveness in police response to emergency alarms. It’s a fully automated electronic alarm transmission service between ECHO-connected alarm receiving centres (ARCs) and the police for intruder and hold-up alarms.

Service Resilience

Our ARC has extensive resilience built into the facility from back up servers and telecoms infrastructure, to uninterrupted power supplies with back up generators.

Furthermore, our secondary back up ARC site can be operational within minutes if the primary ARC site is rendered inoperable.  Testing of backup systems and secondary back up site is routinely tested as part of our standards and processes.

Our Staff

Our alarm handling operators are the best in the business.  Staff go through extensive training both initially as part of their induction, and then ongoing as part of rigorous quality audit checks, group training and feedback initiatives.  Their ability to quickly understand the dynamics of the situation and to action the appropriate response is crucial.  Staff are supported by cutting edge alarm handling software that enables them to quickly and efficiently pick up alarms, access audio, communicate with the user, access and communicate with escalate contacts and the emergency services, view live video streams from body worn cameras, and view real time location information.