This blog post is about the importance of emergency communication and how mass notification has evolved as a concept and technology for greater situational awareness. A link to a pre-recorded risk management webinar appears at the conclusion of this post.
Communication is key to daily life. Just think about all of the screens that surround us — the ones in our homes, offices, malls, sporting events and transit lines. They’re everywhere, including in our pockets. But aside from checking schedules or sports scores, communication is most important in the event of an emergency. Just think about the different types of events that warrant effective emergency response, including communication: medical emergency, fire, inclement weather, bomb threat, armed intruder. Is your organization prepared to communicate with all of the people who might be impacted by any of these situations?
One of the buzzwords in the emergency communication and response industry is “mass notification.” Following a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia in 1996 that killed 19 and wounded 272 others, primarily U.S. Air Force personnel, the Department of Defense issued an official document that discussed the need for mass notification, defining it as “… the capability to provide real-time information and instructions to people in a building, area, site or installation using intelligible communications including visible signals, text and graphics, and possibly other tactile or communication methods.”
Mass Notification Is an Application of Situational Awareness Technology for Life Safety
So mass notification as a concept wasn’t born until 20 years ago. But today, it’s a crucial element of emergency response and part of Status Solutions’ technology platform for situational awareness, including centralized alarm monitoring, alerting and reporting.
When we talk about situational awareness and what having relevant, real-time information means to an organization, it boils down to how integration and automation through technology can take a facility from reactionary and siloed to strategic and holistic in terms of communication and response to a triggering event, such as those I mentioned above – or any incident that could impact business continuity.
If you can read, hear and see what’s happening and where, you can do something about it. Then you can analyze response times and other protocols to resolve problems and make improvements on an on-going basis.
But situational awareness is not a one-size- fits-all technology. It’s a customizable solution that provides multiple alerting/mass notification options, with built-in escalation paths, to improve the protection of people, property and business.
Here’s a Pre-recorded Webinar with More Information About Improving Mass Notification
If your organization needs to notify large numbers of people and ensure coordination of both on- and off-site responders, it’s possible to integrate your current alarm and communication systems and automate notifications to speed emergency response.
We invite you to view our mass notification webinar to help you increase your situational awareness, improving both emergency and non-emergency communication.
