Over 700 staff at Scotland’s State Hospital high security psychiatric facility in Lanarkshire, currently undergoing a £67 million re-build by Skanska (HEJ – November 2010), are now equipped with Bosch PSMicro staff attack devices with a “man down” feature, enabling them to generate an alarm in an emergency wherever they are on the campus.
Located in Carstairs, between Glasgow and Edinburgh, the State Hospital is the only high secure psychiatric facility covering Scotland and Northern Ireland. The re-build will see existing facilities replaced with a state-of-the-art new hospital, due for completion later this year. Key to patients’ long-term safety and health is relational security (therapeutic engagement), combined with physical security. All access, egress, and movement is supervised 24 hours a day. The Bosch RF technology-based PS-Micro staff attack units have been supplied by Leominster-based system integrator Alarm Radio Monitoring (ARM). Martyn Dawson, ARM’s senior engineer, said of them: “Installing the system infrastructure is straightforward, and the compact, robust units are easy to programme and use. State Hospital personnel were aware of the Bosch units’ success in other high security establishments, while, with the site being modernised and expanded in three phases, a phased implementation was important.” “We put the system through a strict test regime before signing off for acceptance,” added State Hospital security director, Doug Irwin. “It met our security and quality expectations. The Bosch graphical frontend on a touchscreen is particularly easy to understand, and simple to operate.” Each staff member collects a PS-Micro on arriving daily and carries it throughout their shift. As they move around the campus, they pass LF-based location beacons which update their location. In an emergency, when the red button is pressed, the unit transmits an alarm and its current/last location to the control room, which receives it instantly, simultaneously activating the integrated PA system in the zone where the alarm was generated. The zone that is “in alarm” flashes on an overlay drawing of that building on the control room touchscreen. The operator touches the screen to acknowledge, and opens the speech channel to that building. The system automatically receives and processes any “multiple alarms” within three seconds, and activates sounders and strobes in all the zones concerned. After acknowledging the alarm, the sounder and strobes stop, and, apart from the speech channel, there is no local indication of an active alarm. With the speech channel open, the control room can communicate with the user for as long as required. Once the user considers the emergency situation is under control, pressing the red button resets their personal alarm.
