As a reminder to all shutterers… Although Lone Working is permitted at Makerspace, only a restricted set of activities may take place.
Prohibited lone working activities
Working at any height
Working any electrical or electronic circuit over 30V or capable of causing injury
Use any machine tools
Use of corded power tools
Use of cordless power tools with blades (i.e. Combi Drill/Impact Driver are permitted)
Use of chemicals with warning labels such as those that are irritants, cause burns or other chemicals which could cause health effects requiring medical attention.
People who have conditions such as epilepsy or other medical conditions where you’re risk of needing medical assistance at random is increased, especially where the condition may cause you to black out, collapse or fit.
HSE Guidence
What next
A number of members are asking if we can do lone working, and the insurance broker said it’s not an issue but you have to follow HSE guidance.
The HSE guidance covers a few areas:
activities that require more than one person to achieve.
personal safety working alone
higher risk activities
higher risk people
monitoring/surveillance to ensure people get home safe/check in periodically
One of the most important points however is this:
being aware that some tasks may be too difficult or dangerous to be carried
out by an unaccompanied worker
I think this may apply to a lot of the lone work we need to do, in reality it’s not practical to install a system and have someone monitor it that allows for monitoring and surveillance of lone working members, really we just need to get people working there more and then we’ll have people around.
The other issue with monitoring solutions is like a fire alarm a home brew option isn’t acceptable as it’s a vital safety mechanism, and I don’t feel we could ever be sure enough that it would work when needed 100% of the time.
Also a system such as the one proposed where members request for those doing their desk job to monitor them on CCTV during specific risky activities, puts a lot of responsibility on a person who is meant to be at work. If an accident did happen they’d effectively need to start calling emergency services and trustees from their workplace which may not be suitable, and they may not have their full attention on the video monitoring.
We can talk it through more, but I am not personally convinced we will ever find a suitable arrangement, nor the demand for the average member to do risky activities great enough that we can’t just take the much simpler option or having members arrange to be there at the same time as each other as is already happening, and will promote more socialising.
If I had a table saw at home I would use it on my own, I thought the inductions were to make people competent in the device they are using and 24 hour access is kinda pointless if you decide you want to cut some wood but cant as no one else is around?
Or am I reading this wrong that these are prohibited unless you follow proper HSE?
At work we just use a app on the phone , have been reading about it i am sure that we can come up with something better than that , but maybe we should put a door release cable in the tray
Don’t worry about home brew stuff not being good enough all we have to do is demonstrate that it works .
We have used systems that don’t work for years in my job snd we can definitely do better than that
I am sure there is a way to handle reporting in on your phone or a push button that you have to press every few minutes, the issue is what happens if you don’t press the button.
Who is going to monitor this, and what are they going to do?
We have a system like this at work, and it’s a bit of a pita. Every now and again 10 members of security staff scramble to a lab to ‘rescue’ a very sheepish looking technician that was too busy doing actual work than to remember to check in…
I think there is more to it, we’ll need an agreed rota for monitoring, or times when lone working is forbidden, and we should probably have panic/emergency buttons.
The procedure might be that those on duty can view the CCTV when the incident is reported, and/or call the space phone. Then if no answer or an incident has taken place they get a taxi to the space ASAP and if needs be call an ambulance.
This could be workable. But would require careful details.
We’d need a way of ensuring an emergency rota was full - this would need to be very different from the open evening rota. more formal, inducted and scheduled well in advance.
We’d also need a tonne of redundancy to make sure any responder was sufficiently close to make this actually useful.
Yes, it would need a web interface that the monitor logs into to confirm they accept responsibility, and then when a member comes to the space to use the wood working they either get their partner to tag in with them in the space, proving there are two people there, or they can see the status of whether there is a person monitoring on duty and based on that tools and risky activities are permitted to be used.
Everything else is crazy complicated or expensive sounding (how much do you have to pay to have checking up on you? And do these services exist freelance? Or does someone have to create it?)
That is how i intended to work but your work buddy don’t have to be in the space , and it only takes one ip camera in the workshop with a fixed ip address simple
joeatkin2 Member
March 12
That is how i intended to work but your work buddy don’t have to be in the space , and it only takes one ip camera in the workshop with a fixed ip address simple
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Obviously the person monitoring would also have to monitor pinged , its simple .
There’s many options , but lots of people loan work with the laser cuter , so we know that its important , because for some reason the laser cuter is not considered dangerous. But it prves its something that wr need
