Admin: Set Up Emergency SOS

Admin: set up Emergency SOS

Emergency SOS gives residents a one-tap alert that reaches guards and committee members with a recorded timeline. This guide covers turning it on, briefing the people who respond, and checking it works before you rely on it.

Before you start

• You are a society admin or a committee member with the safety role
• Your society is on the Community tier or above
• The member roster is imported and flats are claimed, so alerts carry a flat number
• You know which guards and committee members will respond, by shift

Step 1: Open the incident desk

Go to /admin/sos. This is the incident desk — the live list of raised incidents and the history of resolved ones.

If the list is empty, that is expected before your first drill.

Step 2: Add emergency contacts for flats that need them

Emergency contacts are stored per flat — a label and a phone number. When an SOS comes from that flat, the responder sees the contacts on the incident without hunting through the directory.

Prioritise:

• Flats with senior residents living alone
• Flats where the occupant has a known medical condition, if they have told you
• Any flat that asks to be added

Keep the list short and current. Two contacts per flat is plenty. Re-confirm them annually — a contact who moved abroad three years ago is worse than none, because it creates false confidence.

Step 3: Brief the responders before you brief residents

This is the step that decides whether the feature works. If the first real SOS reaches a guard who has never seen the screen, the software has failed regardless of how good it is.

Cover with each shift:

• Where the incident desk is and how alerts arrive
• The four categories — medical, fire, security, other — and who responds to each
• That acknowledging an incident is what tells everyone else it is being handled
• How to resolve an incident and write a resolution note
• That this does not call an ambulance — 112 and 108 still apply

Agree an acknowledgement target. Ninety seconds is reasonable for a manned gate. Publish it.

Step 4: Run a drill

Raise a test incident and mark it as a drill. Drills are recorded but excluded from your response-time statistics, so practice does not distort the numbers.

Run it on a weekday morning, when your staffing is usually weakest. Watch for:

• Did the alert reach the guard on duty?
• How long until someone acknowledged?
• Did the responder find the flat?
• Was the incident resolved with a usable note?

Fix what the drill exposes before announcing to residents.

Step 5: Announce to residents

Publish a notice covering what SOS is for, where to find it, and — explicitly — that it does not replace calling 112. Put the actual emergency numbers in the same notice.

Consider piloting with one wing first. You will discover the specific ways your residents misfire the button before it annoys everyone.

The incident lifecycle

Keeping false alarm distinct from resolved matters at review time. If both collapse into one bucket you cannot tell a well-drilled society from a noisy one.

Reviewing it quarterly

Look at four numbers and present them at the AGM with the security report: total incidents, median time to acknowledge, median time to resolve, and false alarms as a share of the total.

A rising false-alarm rate usually means residents have the button somewhere they keep hitting by accident. A slow acknowledgement median is a staffing problem you now have evidence for.

Audit

Every transition — raised, acknowledged, resolved, cancelled — writes an event on the incident and an entry in the society's append-only audit log. The timeline cannot be edited after the fact, which is what lets you answer "I pressed the button and nobody came" with a record rather than an argument.

Frequently asked questions

Does Emergency SOS call the police or an ambulance? No. It alerts people inside your society — guards, committee, and the flat's emergency contacts. Residents should still call 112, or 108 for an ambulance where it operates. Say this explicitly in your announcement.

Who can see a raised incident? Guards on duty and committee members with the safety role, within your society only. Residents see their own incidents.

How do I stop drills from skewing our response times? Mark the incident as a drill when you raise it. Drills are recorded but excluded from response-time statistics.

A resident raised an SOS by accident. What should they do? Cancel it from their own screen. The cancellation is recorded, and that is fine — an accidental tap that cannot be cancelled trains people not to use the button at all.

Can we add emergency contacts for every flat at once? Contacts are added per flat. Start with the flats that most need them — seniors living alone — rather than trying to collect 200 at once.

Related: Resident: use Emergency SOS · Emergency SOS explained · Admin: set up guard patrol