I was watching the news just now, and there was an article about the Surrey Ambulance Nee Naw Control room. Apparently a woman dialled 999 in desperation because her Polish mother was dialling the Polish equivalent of 999 and was being refused an ambulance. Unfortunately I missed the beginning of the article so I don’t know what was wrong or why it was refused, but it sounds like she was seriously ill. I can just imagine the look on that call taker’s face when he asked for the address of the emergency and was told it was in Poland!
In all my time in Nee Naw Control, I have only had one call for outside the UK. (We get calls for outside London all the time, but those aren’t a problem — we just call the relevant ambulance service and pass the details on.) The call was from a man who had been talking on the phone to a friend in Germany, who had, as far as he could work out, proceeded to choke on a sweet and drop the phone. My caller did not know his friend’s address, nor did he know anyone else in Germany who could help. The only option was for me, with the aid of an interpreter, to ring the International Operator and ask to be put through to the Nee Naw Control in Berlin. They would then have had to ring the telephone company to trace the owner of the phone number (a privilege us ambulance people have).
Fortunately, just as I was being put through, my caller rang up to give us the good news that his friend had managed to cough up the offending sweet by herself and had called him back to let him know she was okay. This was rather fortunate, since I don’t think the poor woman would have stood much of a chance otherwise, even if her friend had been in the same country and knew where she lived!
July 20th, 2006 at 9:12 pm
How or why do you get calls for jobs outside of London? I’ve often wondered at work, we occasionally get jobs with the tag line of “no further details, job passed by xyz service”
July 20th, 2006 at 9:24 pm
Usually it happens when someone calls about a relative/friend/colleague/etc who lives elsewhere. I wish they wouldn’t do it really - it makes triaging difficult and causes a short delay while we pass the call on. Sometimes we get calls from NHS Direct, because no-one has thought to give the NHS Direct advisors a list of different ambulance service numbers, and they just have to call 999. Occasionally someone calls from a mobile on the outskirts of London and come through to us when they’re actually in Surrey/Kent/etc’s area.
July 20th, 2006 at 9:52 pm
A friend of mine used to date a diabetic. For a while they were doing the long distance thing and occasionally (he was not the most responsible diabetic) she would get incoherent phone calls from him and have to call 911 to get an ambulance to go find him half the country away. SHe actually had to do it again recently even though they haven’t spoken for years and he called her out of the blue in an altered state. Is there a better way to go about this than just calling emergency services even though the patient is in another loaction?
July 20th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
I’m surprised you get out of area calls from NHSD - we are meant to give the area of the incident to the BT operator, along with the caller’s number, to ensure we get passed to the right service.
July 21st, 2006 at 12:31 am
Lisa: Maybe some of the advisors don’t know that, then. Or the emergency operator puts them through to the wrong service. We get loads of out of area calls!
Sophia: in the case you mention, there probably isn’t a better way. If there was someone else with the patient, or the patient could call himself, then that would be better. A lot of people call for a relative because “he’s sick, so I said I’d do it” or “I speak better English than she does”, not realising that it’s much easier for us if we speak to someone who’s actually there.
July 21st, 2006 at 11:56 am
Get a few out of area NHSD calls, but usually the BT operator has the callers number and puts two and two together. The aforementioned friend in your area calling for someone somewhere else, always annoying as they don’t know any details other than someone, somewhere might be ill.
Also, one area will generally have an agreement with it’s neighbours to answer it’s overflow. If the “batphone” rings for too long it’s diverted to a neighbour county to take the details and they pass them back after.
OR, and this is the fun one…… it’s on a mobile phone and due to some geographical weirdness the system thinks they’re in your area. I’ve heard it happens in the mountains of Wales and theres a seaside town in our neighbours patch that always comes through to us.
Had a job there that sounded odd, one of the could be hoax/could be odd but serious types. After the third call from the patient we decided to zone in on the mobile’s location (old system, takes a while). Police and Fire did the same and we all came up with the same place. My patch, middle of nowhere, inland…..funny place for a seaside accident. Had a few more calls from other people and they zoned all over the place but never at the incident address. Turns out it was real enough, but very peculiar.
July 22nd, 2006 at 7:45 am
RE: the BT operator directing the calls at NHSD’s request……I work in LAS control with Mark, recently enough i had to pass a call to Surrey or Kent, one of our outer countys and i couldnt get through on our own speed dial, i thought it may be broken so i just dialled 999 or 9999as it was (had to get a outside line) and requested to be put through to them, anyway low and behold ended up speaking to my mate downstairs, who mite i say was rather confused! Got through eventually but just shows they dont always listen to what you request. Maybe they have protocols to direct to the nearest service, who knows?!!
July 22nd, 2006 at 2:31 pm
We had a call once from a worried relative. They had been called by their mother who lived abroad (I have tried to remember where it was but brain is mush today!) and following an earthquake was trapped in a building. It was quite sometime into the call that we worked out that he was not refering to our area, let alone the country!! We ended up contacting the Embassy in London for that country…. somewhere begining with B ….. and passing the details to them. They said they would pass it to the relevant service. It was an unusual one for us!!
July 23rd, 2006 at 9:23 am
As I understand (from talking to someone who works as something techincal for one of the big mobile phone networks and knows about these things) generally speaking the routing of the call from the BT/Cable&Wireless operator who answers the call (who could be anywhere around the country) to the appropriate police/ambulance/fire service is done mostly automatically. In the case of landlines, these are mapped to a fixed address, or in the case of mobiles the base station the call is transmitted through adds some data to the call giving the base station’s location and the call is routed accordingly.
It’s quite possible that on service boundaries, a mobile call from a person in one service area will be transmitted by a base station in another, so the call ends up with the wrong service. (And yes, strange things can happen where you have hills and large open bodies of water etc).
As someone said there is also a system where if the call is not answered by a certain service in a certain time, it will be diverted to another service. This could be e.g. a neighbouring county’s ambulance service, or it could be e.g. the police service taking ambulance calls. Depends on the agreements in the relevant area.
July 23rd, 2006 at 6:05 pm
had one for australia, and couple for northern ireland in my time.
it’s always funny, the australia one was a pain cause we had to go through several different services and the international operator dragged theirs heels until we pointed out somenes life was in danger and that they should perhaps shift their asses.
July 25th, 2006 at 12:09 am
I don’t know why NHS direct exists. I imagine they’ve just got a flow-chart on their computer screens, where all arrows end in “You are going to DIE, phone 999 NOW!!”.
Every time I’ve had to call them, just for a bit of advice, they tell me to call an ambulance and I have to argue with them.
The once occasion they didn’t tell me to ring an ambulance, they told me the vaccination I’d just been given by my GP didn’t exist.
They’re rubbish.
July 25th, 2006 at 11:46 am
“since I don’t think the poor woman would have stood much of a chance otherwise”
Yea, I bet she wouldn’t. Even if the ambulance was close and raced over there, you don’t have much time when someone isn’t getting any oxygen.
July 25th, 2006 at 10:37 pm
I work for Surrey Ambulance, and if memory serves, a Polish lady living in Surrey called 999 after she was told by her grandmother in Poland that the nee-naw service wasn’t responding to her call. So she rang us and explained the situation. Unfortunately, my colleagues couln’t get hold of a contact number for this service after many attempts to do so, so they contacted the Polish embassy, who in turn got in touch with the grandmother’s local hospital. A doctor then came personally to the grandmother’s and took her to hospital. The grandmother is alive and well!
July 27th, 2006 at 9:55 am
I used to live near Dover. It’s funny you mentioned hills/water …
There’s a village nearby (St Margarets) where mobile phone calls REGULARLY go via France. Half the village is at the top of cliff, which has normal service, while the other half is on the seashore which gets a far better signal from France that from the local mast.
July 28th, 2006 at 10:21 am
halo, I am just a visitor.
YES! Helping the others should not care about his/her nationality, sex or whatever. Right?