A COMPANY has come up with a James Bond-style gadget to help protect community workers.

The equipment, which North Liverpool Primary Care Trust has been piloting since October, consists of a tiny mobile phone device which can be hidden in an identity badge.

Staff running into trouble can secretly push a panic button on the back of the badge and an alarm signal is picked up by the service run by Ellesmere Port company, Orbis Monitoring.

The identicoms look like normal ID cards and NHS staff have hailed them a success.

Dave Thomas, alarms commercial director at Orbis Monitoring, said: 'When the wearer pushes the panic button it triggers an alert in the response centre. We can then record physical or verbal abuse.

'From the response centre we can raise the alarm with the emergency services.'

At present, 42 staff work three shifts to monitor 150 existing identicoms. It is expected that identicoms will eventually be given to hundreds of district nurses, health visitors, occupational therapists and other workers who operate alone.

Orbis sales and financial director David Armstrong said: 'This isn't a big brother system. We don't monitor where staff are unless they send us an alert.

'It will be useful in bringing prosecutions. If you write down something someone says to you it often doesn't look so serious, but if you record it you can hear the aggression behind what's being said.'