999 and 112

Seen a lot of posts on Facebook regarding the use of 999 and 112 when calling for emergency assistance. Thought I would publish some information regarding these.

999 or 112 can be used to summon assistance from the three main emergency services, the police, fire brigade and ambulance, or more specialist services such as the coast guard and, in relevant areas, mountain and cave rescue. Calls to 112 or 999 are free. Calls to the European Union and GSM standard emergency number 112 are automatically routed to 999 operators.

First introduced in the London area on 30 June 1937, the UK's 999 number is the world's oldest emergency call service. The system was introduced following a fire on 10 November 1935 in a house on Wimpole Street in which five women were killed. A neighbour had tried to telephone the fire brigade and was so outraged at being held in a queue by the Welbeck telephone exchange that he wrote a letter to the editor of The Times,which prompted a government inquiry.

The initial scheme covered a 12 mile radius around Oxford Circus and the public were advised only to use it in ongoing emergency if "for instance, the man in the flat next to yours is murdering his wife or you have seen a heavily masked cat burglar peering round the stack pipe of the local bank building." The first arrest – for burglary – took place a week later and the scheme was extended to major cities after World War II and then to the whole UK in 1976.

The 9-9-9 format was chosen based on the 'button A' and 'button B' design of pre-payment coin-operated public payphones in wide use (first introduced in 1925) which could be easily modified to allow free use of the 9 digit on the rotary dial in addition to the 0 digit (then used to call the operator), without allowing free use of numbers involving other digits; other combinations of free call 9 and 0 were later used for more purposes, including multiples of 9 (to access exchanges before STD came into use) as a fail-safe for attempted emergency calls, e.g. 9 or 99, reaching at least an operator.

As it happens, the choice of 999 was fortunate for accessibility reasons, compared with e.g. lower numbers: in the dark or in dense smoke, 999 could be dialled by placing a finger one hole away from the dial stop (see the articles on Rotary dial and GPO telephones) and rotating the dial to the full extent three times. This enables all users including the visually impaired to easily dial the emergency number. It is also the case that it is relatively easy for 111, and other low-number sequences, to be dialled accidentally, including when transmission wires making momentary contact produce a pulse similar to dialling (e.g. when overhead cables touch in high winds).

Alternative three-digit numbers for non-emergency calls have also been introduced in recent years. 101 is used for non-urgent calls. Meanwhile, trials of 111 as a number to access health services in the UK for urgent but not life-threatening cases began in 2010.

The introduction of push-button (land line, cordless and mobile) telephones has produced a problem for UK emergency services, due to the ease of same-digit sequences being accidentally keyed, e.g., by objects in the same pocket as a telephone (termed 'pocket dialling') or by children playing with a telephone. This problem is less of a concern with emergency numbers that use two different digits, such as 112 and 911 although on landlines 112 suffers much of the same risk of false generation as the 111 code which was considered and ignored when the original choice of 999 was made.

The pan-European 112 code was introduced in the UK in April 1995 with little publicity. It connects to existing 999 circuits. The GSM standard mandates that the user of a GSM phone can dial 112 without unlocking the keypad, a feature that can save time in emergencies but that also causes some accidental calls. All mobile telephones will make emergency calls with the keypad locked. Originally a valid SIM card was not required to make a 999/112 emergency call in the UK. However, as a result of high numbers of untraceable hoax calls being made, this feature is now blocked by all UK networks. Most UK mobile telephone handsets will dial 999/112 without a SIM inserted (or with a locked/invalid SIM), but the call will not be connected. Following the blocking of SIM-less calls, in 2009 the UK networks introduced emergency call roaming. This allows a user with a valid SIM of a UK network to make emergency calls on any network for which they have coverage.

In the UK all 999 or 112 calls go through to emergency operators of either British Telecom (BT), Cable & Wireless (C&W), Kingston Communications or Global Crossing (RailNet). This depends on which phone network the caller is using. These operators ask the caller which emergency service is required and then connects the caller to the control room of the service requested in the callers geographic region. Virtually all
the emergency service control rooms have access to translators if the caller does not speak English.


Hope this helps to clarify the situation.

Air Ambulance

As you know I had the misfortune to be a customer of one of local Air Ambulances. I was too ill to fly with them but the care they brought may well have saved my life, or at the very least enabled me to be writing this today. The charity, yes the Air Ambulance is NOT run by the NHS it is run by donations! is looking to upgrade the current one to a more modern purpose built aircraft. So have a look at the link and see if you can help. As I discovered YOU NEVER know when you may be watching one land when it comes for you.


http://greatwesternairambulance.com/love-your-air-ambulance

Meningitis, a year on.

It is hard to believe that is a year since I contracted Viral Meningitis. This changed my life and I thought it would be a help for anyone suffering from this to see what recovery is like. I thought maybe some bullet points would be the best way to show my recovery.  

• December 2011. Emergency admission and week spent in hospital.
• January 2012. Returned to work.
• April 2012. Headaches reduced and feely more 'myself'.
• October 2012. Period of depresstion as began to realise what I had gone through.
• November 2012. First time I had felt 'Me' and not frighted about contracting it again.
• December 2012. Still some short term memory and tiredness issues.

This is a very brief outline of the last year but I hope it shows that the recovery, although long is almost 100%. It should also be noted that some of the above can also be put down to age and general life fluctuations. More information can be found at these two excellent sites.

http://www.meningitis-trust.org/

http://www.meningitisuk.org/

Finally some advice on what to do if you suspect someone has Meningitis.

• Call NHS Direct/NHS 24 or your GP.
• Go to your nearest accident and emergency department.
• Dial 999 for an ambulance.
• Describe the symptoms carefully and say that you think it could be meningitis or septicaemia.
• Early diagnosis can be difficult. If you have had advice and are still worried, get medical help again.
• Trust your instincts.

Back from New Wine

Just back a from New Wine. Bit of a strange week this year. I have not really been able to get in to it as much as I usually do. I think this is the fact I only did one week and have the week at the Olympics still to come. However, I still enjoyed it and met some great people with fantastic testimonies. We had the usual jobs to do, patrol, venues gates etc. The usual lost children and found parents to deal with. We also had some very heavy ran which left a lot of tents under water. We did our best to direct the water away from tents but given the volume and speed of the rain in many cases it was a lost cause and the only thing to do was remove the tents in the waters path. It is a times like these that the true Christian spirit really shows through with offers of tents and bedding from around the camp-site. We also had a visit from the Dorset and Somerset Air Ambulance. This required most stewards being deployed around the show ring to enable it to land without any campers wandering into it's path. The crew then had what seem an exciting trip on a buggy to the patient. So now to look forward to this week and my Olympic duties down in Weymouth.