Ermha are a not-for-profit organisation focused on achieving recovery, independence and social inclusion for some of South-East Australia’s most vulnerable individuals. Many of their clients struggle with the challenges associated with disability, mental illness, homelessness, trauma and substance abuse. 
To provide a personal service and wider outreach, Ermha rely on a network of lone workers who support clients on a one-to-one basis. For the organisation, lone working is a great way to provide much needed support in the community.
However, the organisation recognised the risks of working alone and wanted to keep their employees as supported as their clients. This idea led the organisation to StaySafe. StaySafe is a lone worker safety app and monitoring service that allows Ermha to help mitigate the risks associated with working alone in the community.
Each day, community workers are able to begin a session on the StaySafe app which triggers a countdown and visible location details in Ermha’s personal StaySafe Hub. As they enter homes and travel between appointments, users can extend, end and check in to a session to indicate that they are safe, or trigger an alert if they feel they are in danger.
The StaySafe Hub provides a location and status overview of all users who begin a session on the app. A map view allows Ermha to monitor any nearby threats and alert their employees through SMS Broadcast systems. For example, on 18th November 2016, a man set himself alight in a bank located on a busy street. The StaySafe Hub was used to locate employees and send out a warning to prevent anyone from entering the bank or surrounding area.
With 150 lone workers carrying out different services across Victoria, monitoring in-house could seem like a daunting task. However, StaySafe worked closely with Ermha to set up a Hub structure that fit their way of working. Each team is organised into their own Hub with two SuperHubs allowing groups of teams to be monitored separately. The Hubs ease of use and flexibility, allows the organisation to change teams around and add or remove users as they wish.
StaySafe are dedicated to creating a lone working solution that fits the individual needs of the organisation. This is something that Ermha were particularly pleased with when getting started with StaySafe. John Collins at Ermha comments;
“The reactiveness and service we received from StaySafe allowed us to get up and running with the solution quickly and smoothly. StaySafe exceeded our expectations by moulding the system to suit our requirements and provided us with a simple and tailored way to monitor our teams. The entire solution is extremely user friendly so that all our users with varying technological savviness, can use the app with ease.”
“StaySafe provides us and our lone workers with peace of mind that if risk does arise, we can identify and manage it as quickly as possible.”
StaySafe forms an integral part of Ermha’s overall health and safety compliance and provides the organisation peace of mind that their lone workers are safe day to day. The simplicity of the solution and fact that it can be carried with them wherever they go, helps Ermha’s lone workers to feel more confident when going out into the community.
