OVERVIEW
This course provides a thorough awareness of lone working so that lone workers and the managers responsible for them understand the risks involved and how to manage them effectively. Lone working is a normal and lawful feature of many UK jobs — from engineers, drivers and security staff to care workers, estate agents, cleaners, vets, agricultural workers and people working from home — but lone workers can be more vulnerable than colleagues who work alongside others, precisely because help is not immediately to hand if something goes wrong. There is no law that bans working alone, and in most cases it is perfectly safe to do so. However, the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 require every employer to assess the risks to lone workers and to take reasonably practicable steps to remove or control those risks. Crucially, employers owe lone workers exactly the same duty of care as any other worker.
The course is built around the Health and Safety Executive's (HSE) guidance for protecting lone workers, primarily the free leaflet INDG73 ('Protecting lone workers: How to manage the risks of working alone'). It explains in detail what lone working actually is and the surprising variety of situations it covers; the legal framework and the practical responsibilities it places on both employers and employees; the principal dangers lone workers face — accidents and injuries with no one to help, sudden illness, work-related violence and aggression, the strain of isolation on mental health, and the hazards of travel and remote sites; how to carry out a proportionate lone-working risk assessment; and the full range of control measures that keep lone workers safe, including communication and check-in systems, lone-worker devices conforming to BS 8484, supervision, training and emergency arrangements. Throughout, the emphasis is on practical, real-world application rather than theory. Worked examples, comparison tables and step-by-step procedures are used to show how the principles translate into day-to-day practice in UK workplaces. By the end of the course you will be able to recognise when lone working is taking place, judge whether it can be done safely, identify the controls that should be in place, and know exactly what to do — and what your employer must do — if an incident occurs.
