The risks of lone working are the ordinary hazards of a job amplified by the absence of help: violence and aggression with no colleague to intervene, injury or sudden illness with no one to raise the alarm, and the slower toll of working in isolation.
Why working alone raises the stakes
Risk assessments usually score likelihood and severity. Lone working leaves likelihood alone and multiplies severity, because the outcome of an incident depends on time to help. A colleague turns a collapse into a 999 call within a minute. Alone, the same collapse is discovered when someone finally wonders where the worker is. Every risk below should be read with that clock in mind, and it is why the HSE expects risk assessments to answer how a lone worker summons help and how anyone would know they had not come back.
Violence and aggression
The headline risk for anyone whose work involves the public, and above all for people who visit others' homes or handle refusals, arrears, enforcement or care decisions. Housing officers, community nurses, social workers, security staff and retail workers on single-staffed shifts carry the highest exposure. Two features make the lone version worse. There is no colleague to de-escalate or witness, and the aggressor knows it. Discreet alarms exist for exactly this case: a badge device raises an alert with a live audio channel without the worker visibly reaching for anything.
Accidents and sudden illness
Falls, injuries from equipment and vehicles, and medical events such as seizures or cardiac incidents do not need a second person to happen. They need a second person to be survivable at acceptable odds. This is the risk category where fall detection earns its place: a device that raises the alarm after an impact or a period of no movement covers the case where the worker cannot press anything. Roles working at height, with machinery, or driving between sites sit at the sharp end.
Environmental and task hazards
Remote and outdoor work adds its own list: weather exposure, difficult terrain, livestock, confined spaces, and sites with no mobile signal. The last one deserves emphasis because it silently disables most of the control measures an employer thinks it has. A phone-based procedure protects nobody in a signal dead zone; assessments should map coverage honestly and specify satellite equipment where the answer is none.
Isolation and wellbeing
The quiet risk. People who work alone report less, are noticed less and can carry stress, fatigue and mental health strain further before anyone intervenes. The HSE treats work-related stress as a risk to be managed like any other. Practically, that means supervisors who make contact about the person and not just the task, workloads that get reviewed, and a culture where a lone worker asking for support or a second person is treated as good judgement. The routines that make this real are in the best practices guide.
Managing the risks
The sequence is the standard one: assess each lone working situation, put controls in place, write them into the policy, train them, and keep them reviewed. Where the assessment finds a credible emergency scenario, the control that changes outcomes is a monitored alarm, and the BS 8484:2022 audit determines whether that alarm carries a fast-tracked police response. The options are compared across the solutions guide.