Emergency Number 112: Its Nature and the Need to Educate the Public in Poland

BACKGROUND: According to statistical data, since 2014, only about 20% of incoming calls to the emergency call centre have been actual emergency calls, others are classified as non-emergency or false calls. This leads to the question: Why is this situation happening in the Republic of Poland? OBJECTIVES: The aim of this article is to show the public’s awareness with regard to the purpose of 112 emergency number and to indicate the causes and effects of the discussed phenomenon as well as proposals aimed at changing the existing state of affairs. METHODOLOGY: Theoretical and empirical methods were used. An analysis was made of, inter alia, available literature on security and education for safety, sources of law and reports on the functioning of the emergency communication system. Interviews with experts, who are the 112 emergency number operators, were also conducted. CONCLUSIONS: There are many problems generated by the Polish citizens that prevent the proper functioning of the 112 emergency telephone number. The reasons lie primarily in two areas: the lack of adequate education within the context of all social groups and the lack of strict penalties for deliberate performing non-emergency calls or blocking the emergency line.

Aligning caller and call-taker

This paper reports on conversation analytic research for the Dutch national emergency call-centre. In a corpus study of 120 emergency calls we show that callers’ orientations to their communicative tasks are not aligned to the institutional communicative tasks of the call-takers. In a subsequent workplace experiment involving over 2000 calls, it appeared that the use of an alternative question rather than a wh-question, significantly altered callers’ emergency deliveries and adapted them to call-takers’ communicative needs. The analysis shows two aspects of callers’ responses to the different question formats: (i) The alternative questions produced significantly more type-conforming answers than the wh-questions, and also (ii) callers treated their non-conforming answer to alternative question more often as dispreferred than their non-conforming answers to wh-questions. Callers thus treated the preference for type-conformity to be stronger for alternative questions than for wh-questions.