Your Legal Duty as a Lone Worker
Under Section 7 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, employees are required to take reasonable care for themselves and the people around them who may be affected by the things they do, or the things they fail to do.
The test of “reasonable care” is that the employee should do what a reasonable person would be expected to do in similar circumstances, with similar knowledge, training and experience.
This test — of what the ‘reasonable person’ would do in similar circumstances — is one that is potentially confusing for some care staff.
The Dangerous ‘Mother Teresa Syndrome’
We often meet social care and health care staff who are under the impression that their job makes them somehow different. Because the people they look after are vulnerable by their nature, they believe that workers must take what we might call unreasonable risks in order to deliver services to them.
This is the dangerous ‘Mother Teresa Syndrome’ — which places workers at risk due to their unreasonable expectations of themselves.
For example, we meet lone workers who are convinced that, if working alone with a vulnerable person in their home and faced with violent behaviour, the care staff must stay and defuse the situation rather than leave.
Somehow, they have become convinced that they would get in trouble for leaving the vulnerable person “on their own.”
Somehow, they have become convinced that they would get in trouble for leaving the vulnerable person “on their own.”
Lone Working and the Question of Vulnerable People
One common-sense response to this is to ask: “How many vulnerable people are there in this situation?”
I want you to carefully consider our answer: there are at least two vulnerable people in that situation.
One: the vulnerable person who by their nature lacks emotional or cognitive capacity due to a learning disability, mental ill-health, dementia or medical condition.
Two: the vulnerable person who is in close contact with an aggressive, potentially violent human-being who wants to do them an injury during a rapidly-unfolding confrontation for which they are barely prepared and trained for.
Again, we need to remember this: there are two vulnerable people in the situation, and now we are going to ask our employee to take “reasonable care” for themselves and others who may be affected by their actions.
Would it be reasonable for the worker to disengage from this aggressive situation? Could this involve leaving the room or house? If this left the service user by themselves, would this still be ‘reasonable’?
The Fire Alarm Test
If instead of a violent, aggressive service user there was a fire breaking out — which could expose our worker to risk of serious injury — what advice would be appropriate?
We would certainly include the option to remove themselves from the burning building. In fact, our procedures for dealing with fires compel the worker to leave the building.
💡 The fire alarm test: If you would tell a worker to leave a burning building, why would you tell them to stay with a violent person? Both are serious and imminent dangers.
What Regulation 8 Actually Says
Regulation 8 of the Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 makes provision for circumstances of serious and imminent danger. Every employer shall:
- Establish and give effect to appropriate procedures for serious and imminent danger to persons at work
- Inform persons at work of the nature of the hazard and the steps taken to protect them
- Enable persons to stop work and immediately proceed to a place of safety in the event of being exposed to serious, imminent and unavoidable danger
- Save in exceptional cases, prevent persons from resuming work where there is still a serious and imminent danger
So, it seems clear that a lone social or health care worker faced with a serious, imminent and unavoidable danger — such as a service user who is being violent — has the right to withdraw and disengage from that danger. And they should be prevented from returning to that workplace until the danger has been controlled or removed.
“But We Have a Statutory Obligation” — A Real Story
Greater Manchester, circa 2009.
A district nurse is tasked with visiting a man in his flat to re-dress an amputation wound on his leg. He lives in a high-rise block of flats. When the nurse arrives, she is let in by the next-door neighbour, who has a key to the front door. The man can’t come to the door himself.
She opens the front door and meets a strong smell of faeces and urine — the man’s pet dog has not been outside the flat for more than a week and has been using the hallway carpet as a toilet.
The nurse picks her way between the faeces, down the hallway to the bedroom. When she enters, she sees the man sat upright in his bed, watching hardcore pornography on a large flatscreen TV. In his left hand is a remote control.
She spots the dressing on his right leg and moves around the bed to get access to it. As she begins to re-dress the wound, the man pauses the video at various points and asks her inappropriate questions about what is happening on the screen.
She stays focussed — but becomes aware that the man is holding a large steak knife in his right hand, just a foot away from her. She struggles to stay focussed but completes her task quickly and professionally.
As she closes the door to the flat behind her, all the energy drains from her body. She begins to shudder. Tears well up in her eyes. She starts to shake.
She is experiencing the sudden onset of the ‘parasympathetic backlash.’ Without realising it, she has just had a massive dose of adrenaline — the ‘chemical cocktail’ of the survival stress response — while she was in the flat. Her body, keenly aware that the danger has passed, now crashes.
When she gets back to her office, still shaken, she tells her manager what happened:
“I am not going back to that man’s flat again. It’s on my schedule for tomorrow, but I was so frightened and disturbed that I’m sorry — I cannot go back.”
“Nurse, we have a statutory obligation to deliver services to these vulnerable people. I need you to get yourself together and go back to that client. I have no-one else to do it.”
What Regulation 8 Means for That Manager
If we apply the principles of Regulation 8 to this situation, the analysis is clear: not only does the manager have the option to allow the worker not to go back to this situation of danger — the manager has an obligation to prevent his staff from going back into a workplace where there is still a danger which he has not yet taken steps to adequately control.
⚠️ Manager’s legal duty: Regulation 8 doesn’t just permit managers to protect staff from danger — it obliges them to prevent staff from returning until the danger is controlled.
The Bottom Line: Safety Trumps Targets
When staff are completing tasks for their employer, they are at work — and therefore covered by the ample provisions of the Health and Safety at Work Act and its associated Regulations.
There is virtually no set of circumstances under which another piece of statute law, regulation or guidance could supersede the requirements of the Health and Safety at Work Act — or the Human Rights Act Right to Life — for a social or health care worker.
In simple terms: yes, there are statutory obligations to provide services to vulnerable people in our society. But those obligations are themselves subject to the rules about safety at work and the protection of human life. That is what should be the focus of any management team thinking about Lone Worker Personal Safety.
No manager should be prioritising their Key Performance Indicator targets over their obligation to ensure that all of their staff go home safely to their families after their shifts.
No manager should be prioritising KPI targets over their obligation to ensure staff go home safely to their families.
About the Author
Gerard O’Dea is a professional violence-management trainer and consultant who has been active in personal safety training since 2006. He regularly delivers training to local authority, housing organisation and other community-based staff teams who work with sometimes difficult, distressed or dangerous members of the public.
His approach to Lone Worker Personal Safety training is pragmatic, functional and based on a keen analysis of the issues in the real world of community working. Gerard published “Lone Worker Personal Safety: A Guidebook for Health and Social Care Staff” (on Amazon in Paperback and on Kindle) in 2014.
For more information please visit: www.dynamis.training/lone-worker-personal-safety/