Proud to be sponsoring the national personal safety awards - Ian's Blog

16 Feb 2016

"Personal Safety is a life skill” So said Paul Lamplugh at a recent Suzy Lamplugh Trust event to mark 30 years of the Trust. Choosing what items we consider life skills is a personal choice, and is often moulded by upbringing or experience.

For some, swimming, speaking in public or cooking a meal would be considered an important life skill. Personal Safety would not be an obvious choice.

Working with Suzy Lamplugh Trust is not new for us. We have been working with them for some time organising training and workshops. Workshops in Manchester and Birmingham are available in April.We are particularly looking forward to the National Personal Safety Awards in March this year. We as a company are sponsoring the awards, which are organised by the charity Suzy Lamplugh Trust, to celebrate those that work hard to keep us safe. In fact this sponsorship is not just a one-off, we will be sponsoring the event in London in 2017 too.

We are also sponsoring one of the categories, Personal Safety Champion Award, which will be awarded to the individual who facilitated the improvement of safety for employees in the workplace, especially for those employees who work alone.

Personal safety is as important today as it was in 1986. Indeed there seem to be more and more situations where personal safety can be at risk. At Peoplesafe we work in the area of lone worker safety, but there can be risks anywhere: at school, on the street, on a university campus. By being involved with the awards we are helping the Trust highlight the issue and acknowledge good practice wherever it is.

Peoplesafe has selected a category to be added to the awards; “Personal Safety Champion". From our experience at Peoplesafe we have found that the organisations that really take on board lone worker safety are those that have a champion, someone who really pushes to keep lone worker safety on the agenda. It might be the MD, but equally it might be the receptionist.

Thirty years ago when Suzy Lamplugh went missing most of the technology we have now wasn’t around. There were no mobile phones, there were no GPS location systems. We have those now and they are a vital part of the armoury to keep lone workers safe, but they don’t work unless the organisation has the right attitude to actually use them. That’s where personal safety champions come in; they make sure lone worker safety is on the agenda and stays on there. They will use a lot of passion and urgency to ensure their colleagues and managers are proactive.

The awards ceremony will be held at the Church House Conference Centre in London on Thursday March 17.

For more information and to enter go to:

http://www.suzylamplugh.org/get-involved/national-personal-safety-awards-2016/

I hope to see you there.