Better protecting staff working alone

Established four and a half years ago as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dutchheadquartered personal security and critical communications solutions provider, Atus BV, Hereford-based Atus Systems has since established a strong UK-wide client base supplying personal pagers, wireless personal alarm units, and the associated infrastructure, predominantly to high secure mental health facilities, prisons, and detention centres. Recent months, however, mark a new chapter for it, with the launch of a ‘unique’ lone worker protection system able to identify such personnel’s location even when they are indoors and out of range of GPS coverage, and a sophisticated two-way enterprise critical messaging system. As HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, discovered from MD, Darren Swindlehurst, the company will target both systems squarely at the NHS and private healthcare providers, as well as at its more ‘traditional’ customers.

Atus Systems was first established in January 2012, with an office in Cheltenham, to serve UK customers, moving to is current Hereford base when it outgrew the premises in September 2013. The company has been led from the outset by Darren Swindlehurst, who already had over two decades’ personal security sector experience, including as sales and marketing manager at a leading UK nurse call company. Atus BV’s own origins are rooted in the Personal Security Product division of the Bosch Group. In the 1960s Philips established an on-site paging business in Breda in the Netherlands, which was acquired by Bosch in 2002. In September 2010 Atus acquired the division, and it became an independent company able to realise its ambition of focusing on critical communication solutions.

Over the past four years Darren Swindlehurst, and his colleague, operations manager, Alex Tomlinson, explained when I met them at Atus Systems’ Hereford office, the UK business has deployed its considerable industry expertise UK-wide to design, install, and commission, on-site alarm and staff attack alarm systems in premises such as high secure mental healthcare facilities, and children’s secure detention centres. Atus’s pedigree, and the expertise of the Atus Systems team, have seen the company establish a reputation for high quality, hi-tech, reliable, and tailored, staff attack alarm equipment.