Every Department Has SomeoneWorking Alone.

Anyone working out of sight or earshot of a colleague who could help them. That is a wider group than most organizations expect: the bylaw or code enforcement officer on an evening shift, the water operator at a lift station, the social worker going into a home, the librarian closing up alone, the parks crew member on the far side of a property. The test is not whether the work looks dangerous. It is whether anyone would notice if it went wrong.

Across our government customers the common ones are bylaw and code enforcement, licensing, public works, roads and fleet, water and wastewater, parks, recreation and facilities, social services and housing, paramedic services, building and public health inspection, transit, animal services, libraries and community centres, and front counter staff. Most organizations start with the one or two departments where the exposure is obvious and add the rest once the protocols are proven.

In almost every case, yes. Occupational health and safety law places a general duty on employers to take reasonable care for the safety of their workers, and most Canadian provinces add specific working alone provisions on top of it. Those typically require a hazard assessment, an effective means of communication, and contact at set intervals. The exact wording and the interval are set by your own jurisdiction, so check your provincial or state regulation for the detail. What they have in common is that a phone in a pocket is not treated as a system.

A phone call needs the worker to be conscious, free to dial, and willing to be overheard. Several of the situations on this page break at least one of those. SolusGuard runs as an app on the phone your department already issues and adds the parts a phone call cannot cover: a scheduled check-in that raises an alert on its own when it is missed, a duress button that can be pressed without a word, automatic fall detection, and live location sent with the alert so help goes to the person rather than the address.

That is your decision, and it can differ by department. An alert can go to your own supervisors and managers through the shared alert feed, to SolusGuard's 24/7 professional monitoring agents, to your internal team in Command Center, or to any combination of the three. Most municipalities run their own people through business hours and hand the nights, weekends, and on-call shifts to our agents, because that is the window where nobody is at a desk to notice.

Yes, and in practice every organization needs that. A bylaw or code enforcement officer on an evening shift and a water operator at a lift station do not want the same people called in the same order. Each group gets its own check-in intervals, its own emergency network, and its own escalation path, all under one account with one set of billing and one admin view. Emergency networks are configured per user with unlimited contacts at no extra cost.

No, and this is usually the first question a union asks. Location is shared only when it is needed: while a check-in session is running, and during any alert. Outside those moments nothing is collected and there is no location for a supervisor to look at. It is a safety tool, not a productivity tool, and rollouts go far better where staff are told up front what is shared, when, and who can see it.

No. Almost nobody does. The usual path is one department where the exposure is clearest, often bylaw and code enforcement, or water and wastewater, run until the protocols and the escalation lists are right. The rest of the organization is then added under the same account, reusing what you already built rather than starting the procurement and the policy work over again.