The challenge
Mentis Assist provides community-based mental-health support across central and gippsland Victoria. Outreach workers visit clients in their homes, often during periods of acute crisis. The service had no single platform for managing field-worker safety; processes varied team to team.
After a serious incident in late 2024, the board approved a service-wide safety upgrade.
The approach
Mentis Assist selected Duress for two reasons: discreet form factor (Phoenix as a credit-card device that does not signal worry to clients) and the Australia-based monitoring centre (matching their staff’s expectations of cultural fit on calls).
Rollout was completed in four weeks, with all 70+ outreach workers carrying Phoenix devices paired to the Duress App on their work phones.
The outcome
Internal surveys six months post-rollout returned a 10/10 average confidence score from outreach staff on the question “do you feel adequately protected during home visits?” Up from 4/10 pre-deployment.
Three high-acuity incidents in the period were handled start to finish by the monitoring centre with no harm to staff. Each was reviewed in the operations meeting and used to refine response protocols.