Escalation procedure
An escalation procedure is the pre-agreed sequence of steps that runs when a worker misses a check-in or raises an alarm: who is contacted, in what order, how quickly, and when emergency services are called.
Escalation is where lone-worker programs succeed or quietly fail. The alarm firing is the start; the escalation procedure decides what actually happens next. A good one names every step: attempt contact with the worker, notify the nominated responders, engage the monitored response, dispatch emergency services with the last known location - each with a time bound and an owner.
The common failure is escalation that depends on one person noticing. If the procedure is 'the supervisor calls the worker back', it fails on the supervisor's day off. Monitored systems close that gap by making the first steps automatic: a missed check-in escalates on its own, and a trained operator runs the sequence the same way at 3am as at 3pm.
In the Duress system, escalation is logged end to end: every attempt, timestamp and decision posts to the incident record, which is what an investigation or insurer will ask for afterwards.