Australia & New Zealand plan duress alarm standard

RTLS Intelligence has opened a public consultation on a proposed Australia and New Zealand standard for mobile duress and personal alarm systems. The draft would set a five-second maximum for emergency alarm delivery.

It would also require every alarm to transmit the location of the worker who raised it, creating what RTLS Intelligence describes as the first performance benchmark of its kind in either country for wearable safety alarms used by health and care staff, community workers, and security personnel.

The proposal comes as assault-related injuries among healthcare workers have risen sharply. Figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, published in July, showed the number of healthcare workers hospitalised after assaults at work increased from 49 a year in 2015-16 to 126 in 2024-25.

In the wider population, assault is the seventh-leading cause of injury hospitalisation. In healthcare workplaces, it has become the second-leading cause of workplace injury hospitalisation, up from fourth.

A separate survey of 1,333 nurses, midwives, and carers in New South Wales, published in March, found 88 per cent had experienced occupational violence over six months. Public sector members reported the highest frequency, and the survey also found violence was significantly underreported.

Among those who did report an incident, fewer than two in 10 believed any action had been taken. The report recommended giving workers equipment to summon assistance and ensuring trained responders were available across all locations, but it did not define how quickly that response should begin.

Performance gap

The proposed standard aims to fill that gap by setting a specific time threshold for alarm delivery. It covers mobile duress and personal alarm systems used by nurses, paramedics, aged care staff, community workers, and security personnel.

Under the draft, compliance would depend on more than a device's ability to send an alert. It would also cover whether systems can verify battery life under real operating conditions, report connectivity failures rather than let them go unnoticed, and encrypt alarm and location data.

Automatic safety functions such as fall detection are also included. The framework is designed to be technology-neutral, applying across cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, LoRaWAN, and satellite-based systems without naming any product or supplier.

Mark Winter, Chief Executive Officer of RTLS Intelligence, set out the case for a formal benchmark.

"Personal duress systems have become critical safety infrastructure, but there has never been a benchmark for what acceptable performance looks like," Winter said.

"Nobody has had to prove the button works."

Limits of alarms

The evidence cited alongside the consultation also distinguishes between preventing violence and responding to it once it begins. The New South Wales survey rated personal duress alarms as less effective at preventing violence than adequate staffing levels and safer physical environments.

Winter addressed that point directly.

"An alarm does not stop an assault starting, and nobody should claim it does. It determines what happens in the minutes after one starts.

"Those are two different problems. Staffing is the first one. A performance standard can only fix the second, and at the moment nothing is fixing it at all."

The issue is particularly acute for workers outside institutional settings. The report found that nurses and midwives in community services often work alone in people's homes without the same security measures available in hospitals.

That makes the reliability of mobile alarms more important, because workers may have fewer immediate options for calling for help. A system that fails silently, loses connection, or does not communicate location data could limit the usefulness of any alert in those circumstances.

Consultation stage

The consultation marks the first step in what could become a broader standards framework. The Australia and New Zealand draft could later be considered either as separate national standards in Asian markets or as a wider Asia-Pacific framework, depending on feedback from this round.

Winter said the problem extended beyond the two countries covered by the draft.

"A duress alarm is a life-safety device.

"If someone activates one in an emergency, they should not have to wonder whether it arrived."

He also outlined the possible path beyond the current proposal.

"The problem is not unique to Australia and New Zealand.

"Where this goes next, country by country through Asia or as one Asia-Pacific standard, will depend in large part on what comes back in this first round."