Khidmah LLC
Health & Safety Initiative of the Year Award 2017
Facilities Management
Dubai
Challenges:
Khidmah faced different obstacles and one of them consisted in the difficulty of getting mobilized for public beaches for the first time, as the company had only managed community beaches. Consequently, we had to train our lifeguards on managing public beaches, which strengthened our standards and reinforced our experience. For instance, we got the blue flag certification as required by…
Khidmah faced different obstacles and one of them consisted in the difficulty of getting mobilized for public beaches for the first time, as the company had only managed community beaches. Consequently, we had to train our lifeguards on managing public beaches, which strengthened our standards and reinforced our experience. For instance, we got the blue flag certification as required by the Dubai Municipality. Moreover, we undertook assessments and worked on a new and innovative emergency action plan which was entirely different from the ones dedicated for community beaches managed by Khidmah. What is more, we trained our lifeguards to enable them to meet the level of fitness and rescue criteria set and required by Khidmah as well as the Dubai Municipality. To explain more, the process in place requires the prescreening of lifeguards to ensure that they have the right physical requirements and skills to successfully perform rescues. In fact, lifeguards should be able to swim and perform precise physical activities such as swimming, running, and diving. After their evaluation and selection, Khidmah’s lifeguards have to follow a strict fitness regime / diet to maintain their physical performance and fitness. Another challenge we’ve faced when we started the operations was the unavailability of rescue equipment. Hence, we had to manually rescue different people without the use of appropriate equipment. In addition to that, the diversity of people accessing public beaches was one of the challenges we had to deal with. As a matter of fact, people rescued were from different genders, nationalities, cultural backgrounds and behavioral patterns. Consequently, some people were friendly and other ones were very aggressive, and this made rescue operations a bit challenging. One of the most notable challenges we’ve also faced consisted in the distance between each lifeguard station, which was around 300 meters. Thus, it was difficult for our lifeguards to keep on being vigil to reach every person in distress and who is requesting help.
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Brief:
Khidmah had deployed trained lifeguards under the directives of our client which is the Dubai Municipality and also in coordination with other regulatory authorities such as Dubai Police. Khidmah Management Beach Rescue Team operated on a daily basis to prevent accidents, drownings and conflicts. This included zoning for swimmers, surfers, wind surfers and motorized craft in in addition to the…
Khidmah had deployed trained lifeguards under the directives of our client which is the Dubai Municipality and also in coordination with other regulatory authorities such as Dubai Police. Khidmah Management Beach Rescue Team operated on a daily basis to prevent accidents, drownings and conflicts. This included zoning for swimmers, surfers, wind surfers and motorized craft in in addition to the extra tasks on the rescue team and management. The Rescue Management team worked very hard to make sure that the beach itself is managed in an environmentally friendly manner that protects endangered species as well as the beach’s habitats.
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Impact:
Despite all of these challenges, we have successfully worked on the project while complying with the environmental standards of the beaches as well as the directions of the Dubai municipality. We have also deployed approximately 100 lifeguards on the Dubai beaches and they were successful in completing 1013 rescue operations. This means that our lifeguards were successful in saving 1013…
Despite all of these challenges, we have successfully worked on the project while complying with the environmental standards of the beaches as well as the directions of the Dubai municipality. We have also deployed approximately 100 lifeguards on the Dubai beaches and they were successful in completing 1013 rescue operations. This means that our lifeguards were successful in saving 1013 lives during the period of 12 months between in 2016 and first quarter of 2017. Khidmah’s impact consisted of saving the lives of people from different genders, ages, backgrounds and nationalities. In reality, our rescue statistics show that we have saved the lives of 55 nationalities and we are very proud about achievement as life is priceless and there is no value that we can attach to it. Moreover, in 2016, Khidmah employees have successfully accumulated 12.4 million safe working hours while contractors reached around 2.4 million ones. All of these indicators prove that we have a system ensuring safety and that our measures are effective and successful. What is more, these statistics are indicators that show to what extent our pro-active trainings and various conducted campaigns were successful. As a matter of fact, we’ve put a rigorous training program consisting of 11,300 training hours, which enabled us to improve motivation levels of our lifeguards. All of our lifeguards were trained for first aid and this enabled the company to obtain the required ISO standards and meet the requirements of the local regulatory authorities. For that matter, we also had to meet with the Dubai Police and the Dubai Municipality officials before designing and finalizing our strategy on beach operations. Even if we’ve faced all of these challenges, we successfully overcame them and achieved a number of 1013 lives saved in 2016 and first quarter of 2017. We wouldn’t have achieved this without the rigorous lifeguards’ training which consisted of 11,320 fitness and training hours, and which also allowed us to improve performance and motivation levels. On top of that, we were (and still are) proud to have served the nation through the 950 rescues performed in 2016 in addition to another 63 rescues in the first quarter of 2017. Developing the emergency action plan was one of the challenges faced as there were certain areas of Dubai that were highly risky and which also witnessed different construction activities. Even if those areas were considered highly risky ones, we were successful in rescuing many people thanks to our well developed rescue system including our protocols. This system mainly depended on the beach operations manager, the assistant beach operations manager, as well as the head of lifeguards. In order to effectively survey beaches, we divided and classified them into different zones according to the surveillance plan so that the beach operations team could have a particular methodology to scan the beaches without making any mistakes. To continuously ensure the surveillance of beaches, we made sure to face the challenge of changing lifeguards. As a matter of fact, if a lifeguard would like to leave the beach, another lifeguard should immediately replace him, as no part of the beaches shouldn’t be left without surveillance. Consequently, we divided the working time from sunrise to sunset as lighting levels vary during the days. What is more, we took into consideration the risk factor of lifeguards’ visibility and implemented the adequate precautions and pro-active approach. We have also assisted the Dubai Municipality in opening 9 beaches and appreciated its support and inputs during the implementation of our multiple initiatives. https://www.khidmah.com/en/who-we-are/awards-recognition
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