Breakaway Training: Judges Comments in Dementia Care Assault Case
Breakaway Training: A Judge’s Warning from a Dementia Care Case A 75-year-old resident in a care home suffered from dementia. In just four months since arriving, he had committed 13 acts of aggression and at least 5 attempts at serious acts of aggression — including trying to strangle one of the other residents. Witnesses gave […]
Judge offers comments in Dementia Care Home Assault case
Training Lone Workers: Who should go on the visit?
Training Lone Workers: Who Should Go on the Visit? Training lone workers sometimes means making sure they carefully decide whether a visit should go ahead — and how many people should attend. Sometimes, client history means no visit at all. In a rough-cut from a recent course, our Director of Training Gerard O’Dea describes the […]
The potential for actual management of aggression
The Potential for Actual Management of Aggression Twice in this article from the Herald newspaper, members of staff at a facility in Ireland mention the specific training system they are trained in — presumably for their own personal safety, for the control of violent clients, and for the protection of others. That system is MAPA, […]
Personal Safety for Lone Workers
Should organisations prioritise personal safety for lone workers? Employers have a legal duty under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare at work of their employees. This act of parliament places a statutory duty on employers, besides their common law duty […]
Housing Officer Safety and Lone Working: Trust your intuition to Stay Safe
Housing Officer Safety and Lone Working: Trust Your Instincts Gavin DeBecker, in his seminal work on personal safety The Gift of Fear, offers us a crucial and often overlooked perspective on taking control of our safety. His key point, illustrated again and again in his examples and case studies, is that when our innate survival […]
Lone Working Staff Safety through Supervision and Monitoring
Director of Training and Lone Working Staff Safety expert Gerard O’Dea discusses a key story about the tragic loss of a lone worker in the area of social care and home care. The issues of lone worker supervision, diary management, and monitoring of safety are crucial to the protection of lone workers — and this […]
Community team safety and Doorstep Decisions
Doorstep Decisions for Community Team Safety Community team safety often hinges on difficult decisions made on the doorstep. When approaching the front door of a previously violent client’s house, knowing their background, history and recent state, what threshold of danger would you set for the meeting you are about to have? Low Risk? Medium Risk? […]
Personal Safety for Community Workers: Sharing Information
Past history of violent behaviour is the strongest predictor of future violence. I recall reading a news article in a sunday paper some time ago which described a reporter’s experiences while spending a weekend on the road with a London Ambulance Service (LAS) crew. Amongst descriptions of paramedics being shot and being shot-at, about the violence […]
Keeping Lone Workers Safe: Information Sharing
In this rough-cut video clip from a recent Lone Worker Personal Safety Training programme, our Director of Training and Keeping Lone Workers Safe expert trainer Gerard O’Dea discusses one important case where a lone worker was seriously attacked by a person who had issued threats to her – but the information was never shared by […]