Callmy at Hartpury University’s WellFest Event

Callmy had the pleasure of supporting Hartpury University’s WellFest event on 22 September.

Hartpury organised an event in 2014 focusing on student safety – ‘Drive for Life: Safe & Social Driving’. This  centred around one of the priorities of Gloucestershire’s Police & Crime Commissioner’s theme of keeping young people safe on the county’s roads: from drivers to passengers, to horse riders and pedestrians.

This then developed into ‘WellFest’, an annual event running from 2015 that expanded on the road safety theme to include general student safety, wellbeing and health (mental & physical) – incorporating some of the core themes from Gloucestershire Healthy Living & Learning. 2019’s event was made hugely successful by over 60 external organisations delivering workshops and running exhibits/stands. In 2020, in line with Covid restrictions, WellFest was delivered virtually and in 2021 a a scaled down event was delivered.

This year has seen WellFest return to its full scale, with over 50 organisations participating. The use of Callmy Alert at Hartpury is helping to provide students with a means to stay safe whilst studying, socialising and working alone.

The service provides students with an SOS app that alerts the University’s Residential Support Team when

activated. This enables them to see the students contact details and their GPS location. In addition they can access the microphone on the students phone, to hear what is happening at the scene of the activation – essential for situational awareness and an effective triage.

If students are in situations where they may be nervous or perceive a threat, such as walking home alone, they can set a timer, in their Callmy Alert app, that triggers the SOS alert if it is not deactivated before the time has elapsed.

All SOS and message response data is available in real-time and is archived on the service for audit and eventual purposes.

The IT department at Hartpury are also now deploying the Callmy Alert app on all desktop computers throughout the university – this is to exploit the mass notification capabilities of Callmy Alert that enables urgent messages to be delivered during critical situations – now essential for compliance with the Protect Legislation.

Hartpury are using Callmy Alert’s integration with Azure Active Directory, to ensure contact details are always kept up to date whilst minimising management overheads.

Please contact us if you would like to learn more about how Callmy Alert is helping to support security, safety and well-being in the education sector.