Duress response plan
A duress response plan defines exactly what happens after a duress alarm is raised: who is notified, in what order, how fast, with what information, and the criteria for escalating to emergency services.
Most safety programs over-invest in the trigger and under-specify the response. A response plan closes that gap with concrete answers: the alarm reaches a monitored operator within a stated time; the operator has the worker's identity, location, and live audio; escalation follows a documented tree - nominated contacts, on-site response, emergency services - with the criteria for each step written down in advance.
Good plans are measured, not aspirational. The two numbers that matter are time-to-human (in the FY26 Duress data, a 7-second median) and time-to-resolution (a 90-second median for false alarms; around nine minutes of live response for confirmed emergencies). If a vendor or an internal plan cannot state its numbers, the plan is a hope.
Plans also decide what happens on the 93% of activations that do not end up needing emergency services: a defined verification script, de-escalation with the worker on the line, and a record. Answering everything is the design, so the plan has to make answering everything cheap.