Planning the response to a duress alarm

A duress alarm is only as good as the response behind it. Planning that response means deciding who receives the alarm, how they confirm and assess it, who goes and how quickly, what they do when they arrive, when police are called, and how each event is recorded and reviewed. The plan should be written, known by everyone involved and practised.

Organizations often buy duress buttons and leave the response to be worked out on the day. The result is predictable: an alarm sounds at a desk that is unattended at lunch, or two managers both assume the other has gone, or responders arrive at the wrong end of the building. Each of these is a planning gap, and each can be closed before it matters.

Start with the risk assessment

Occupational health and safety law in every province requires employers to assess hazards, and Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario all have specific requirements on workplace violence. In general terms, employers must assess the risk of violence, put controls in place, have procedures for responding to incidents and train workers on them. Ontario's Occupational Health and Safety Act, for example, expects a workplace violence program to include measures and procedures for summoning immediate assistance. Check the current requirements in your province.

The risk assessment tells you who is at risk, where, when and from what. That shapes the response plan: a clinic with occasional aggressive visitors needs a different response from a bank branch planning for robbery, and both differ from an outreach team working in clients' homes. Our guide to working alone safely covers staff who work out of sight of colleagues.

The response, step by step

Every response passes through the same stages, even if some take seconds. Writing down what happens at each stage, and who does it, is the core of the plan.

1. Acknowledge. The receiver confirms the alarm on the system, which stops escalation and starts the clock. If no one acknowledges within a set time, the alarm should go to the next receiver automatically.
2. Assess. Where is it, and what is happening? Location comes from the system; cameras covering the area can show more. Avoid phoning the room in a way that could reveal that help is coming. Some organizations use a code phrase that staff can say on a call to signal real danger.
3. Dispatch. Send the agreed number of responders, never just one person into an unknown situation unless the plan and their training allow for it. Tell them the exact location and what is known.
4. Respond. Responders approach calmly, assess before entering, use the de-escalation skills they have been trained in and focus on getting the staff member to safety. Their own safety comes first: if the situation is beyond them, they withdraw and wait for police.
5. Escalate to police when there is a weapon, an assault, a credible threat or a situation the team cannot safely manage. Decide in advance who makes that call and send someone to meet officers and guide them in.
6. Recover. Look after the staff member: first aid, time away from the front line, a debrief and access to support. Secure any video, reset the device and record what happened.

Who does what

Name people, or positions with a named person on each shift, rather than departments. "Security" is not an answer at 2 a.m. if security is one person on patrol at the far end of the site.

Response times and staffing

Ask a simple question: from the moment the button is pressed, how long until help is standing in the room? Walk it on every shift. The answer depends on who is available, how far they are, whether they must pass locked doors and whether the location reported is precise. A plan that works on a weekday afternoon may fail on a night shift with half the staff. Where response times are long, the plan may need more responders, a monitoring centre that dispatches outside help, changes to how work is staffed, or other controls that reduce the risk in the first place. Our guide to duress and panic alarms explains how the alarm itself travels.

Responders need training that matches what they will face, typically including de-escalation, team approaches and when to withdraw. They also need practice with the system: knowing how to read the map, acknowledge an alarm and reset a device.

A typical case

A school district installs duress buttons in each school's front office, routed to the principal's phone and the office radio. A walk-through on a weekday afternoon goes smoothly. A second walk-through during an evening event shows the problem: the office is locked, the principal is in the gym and the custodian has no radio. The revised plan routes after-hours alarms to the custodian and the district's monitoring centre, which can dispatch police, and the event checklist now names who carries the radio. Nothing about the hardware changed; the plan simply caught up with how the building is used.

Drills and review

A response plan that has never been tested is a set of assumptions. Drills, announced at first and later less predictable, show whether alarms reach the right people, whether the location is right and how long the response takes. Every real alarm, including false ones, deserves a short review as well.

For each drill or real alarm, record:

• The device, the location reported and the actual location.
• The time the alarm was raised, acknowledged, dispatched and answered in person.
• Who responded, and whether the right number went.
• Whether cameras, phones and other integrations worked.
• Whether police were called, and how quickly they were guided in.
• What went well, what went wrong and who will fix each problem, by when.

Treat findings the way you would any incident, as described in our guide to incident investigation, and fold the duress response into your wider emergency response plan.

How ehZee can help

We design duress systems around the response plan: who receives each alarm, how escalation works, which integrations help responders and how the system will be tested and drilled. See our duress and panic alarm systems service.

Common questions