Lone working sessions

Lone working

When a member of estates or facilities is on-site outside of normal hours — early morning, weekend, holiday cover — they’re working alone. The lone-working surface gives the trust a structured way to know they’re OK without resorting to “text me when you get there”.

The flow

1. Start a session before going on-site. Pick a site, describe what you’re doing in a sentence, and set the expected check-in time (in minutes from now) — usually the time you expect to finish (or sooner for higher-risk work).
2. The session is active until that time.
3. Before the deadline, check in. You’re back to safe. Optionally extend with a new deadline if you’re staying longer.
4. If you don’t check in by the deadline, the background check command (runs every 5 minutes) transitions the session. If an escalation contact email was provided, the session moves straight to escalated and an automated alert email is sent. Without an escalation contact, it moves to overdue and shows red on the agent dashboard — the expectation is that a colleague is monitoring the screen.

What the index shows

• My open sessions — yours, top of the page.
• All open sessions — every active/overdue/escalated session across the trust, sorted by who’s most overdue.
• Recently closed — history.

Closed sessions have status checked_in (the planned case — user checked in before the deadline) or cancelled (user or admin cancelled the session manually). The background command does not auto-close sessions; overdue/escalated rows remain open until a check-in or cancellation.

Gotchas

• The state machine is driven by a background console command (estates:lone-work-check), which runs every five minutes. If the scheduler isn’t running, deadlines won’t trip — surface this with your sysadmin during install. Sessions with no escalation contact email will only reach overdue status, not escalated; make sure you configure an escalation contact if you want email alerts.
• Sessions are user-scoped; you can only check yourself in. If a colleague is incommunicado, the right reaction is to physically check on them, not to log in as them.
• Expected check-in should be your finish time + a few minutes, not the start of your task. A 2-hour boiler check shouldn’t have a 30-minute check-in window.

Related

• Risk assessments
• Sites, buildings, floors, rooms