One in seven 000 calls not answered?

Ozi said :

I completely and totally believe that every genuine 000 call should be answered promptly and efficiently. But ant your view that every call to 000 is genuine is either misinformed or hopelessly naïve.

When I finally call 000 for the first time, I will expect it to be answered and for help to come quickly. that is where it starts and ends for me.

If people are abusing it, we have the technology to find and prosecute those who abuse it. If they are prosecuted, abuse will stop.

for our emergency number to be not 100% reliable is unacceptable.

The figure Mr Smyth is talking about is the answering of the call by the ACTAS call centre, they would not be able to measure the time for calls going to a Telstra call centre. At no time is he critisising the ACTAS call centre staff or accusing them of doing their jobs properly, it just highlights the systemic lack of proper funding. I think if he looked at the numbers and it being an “average” time, the number of calls answered within the target timeframe is quite low and that most of the calls actually take a long time to answer. The average is fairly heavily influenced by calls answered very quickly in times where it is very quiet.

Ok people here it is in simple terms: all 000 calls are answered even if they “flood” the call centre as described above, the calls are diverted to other 000 call centres throughout australia – say Sydney Melbourne or Woolongong where all relevant information regarding the cases are taken then sent back to the local area call centre where appropriate resources dispatched as needed.
I think you will find that the so called “unanswered” seventh call are calls that actually fall out side of bench marks of time for the answering a call (the time that the phone rings prior to an operator actually picking up the reciever – in this case an arbitary three rings – roughly 3 seconds). It does not meen that the call is ignored, it just means that the call was answered after say 5 seconds.
For more information on ACTAS bench marks I suggest you look at the Auditor generals report into the Ambulance service.
As for the abuse of 000 services I can only agree that far to many people inappropriately call 000 – if you have a cough, cold or flu – you dont need an Ambulance – it wont get you past the triage queue – you will go back into the waiting room – as these are things that can be handled at medical centres or your GP.
@Laughtong – A number of reasons for the 30min response 1)A fractured hip is not an immediately life threatening injury – an ambulance will not respond lights and sirens and push through traffic to every job. 2)There is only 7 crewed intensive care ambulances servicing the ACT at any 1 time and they are busy – every call is triaged – given a level of urgency, and depending on its severity response times will increase or decrease (more life threatening = quicker response). 3)Offload times at hospital and bed availability – Canberra only has 2 emergency depatments – and calvary does not have the facilities for emergency Orthopaedics, Paediatrics, Trauma or Cardiac Care – at best a patient may be stabilised there before being sent onto Canberra Hospital. If a Hospital is overloaded delays will occur.
@ Special G – We need all of those as well as increased funding for hospitals, more nurses, doctors, allied health, mental health and infrastructure.

Post # 14 by Spam Box, I mean.

ant said :

If someone’s calling 000, Ozi, I’d expect it to be something pretty serious, like someone dying in front of you. I’d imagine that anyone calling 000 is in a situation that could be described as “emotive”. What other example could one use?

000 is for life or death situations, AKA “emergencies”.

A massive amount of calls to 000 is not the example you are providing above ant, which also means a massive amount of calls to 000 aren’t emergencies. If 1 out of 7 is being missed, I would be blaming the people tying up 000 lines with non emergency rubbish.

There are more to stats than just black and white figures. Spam box brought up a good question/scenario.

Statistics can be modified to come up with almost anything you want to push your agenda. Comes down to a couple of things:
– lack of Telstra operators
– lack of ACT Ambulance operators
– Lack of Ambulances
– Lack of Ambulance Officers.

Pick one to address the problem.

Now that seems like something worth complaining about rather then arbitrary 000 statistics.

I assume they had a lot on and a simple fall (traumatic as it was, I’m sure) was assigned a lower priority, this is understandable. (Unless it was my Grandma, then see how my opinion changes);-)

Poor duck, hope she recovers quick.

That’s not good enough by any means.

Related to this – my husband works as a Care Worker assisting frail elderly in their own homes. One day a couple of weeks ago he arrives to find his client had fallen in her driveway, and broken her hip while attempting to collect her newspaper. Suburban Canberra. Very cold morning and this client is 90 years old. All that could be done was to cover her in blankets until the ambulance got there.

An ambulance had already been called by a neighbor, but it took a couple of follow-up calls and more than 30 minutes after he got there, before an ambulance finally arrived.

This is bad enough but what if it had really been time critical!

It would be interesting to know what the percentage of “failed to answer” calls occur from when a large number of people all ring at the same time about the same emergency.

A fire, a heavy accident etc and I can see 20+ calls hitting 000 all within a few minutes.

Even something less major could attract 5-10 inside a minute.(The operators would still be online with the original callers gathering info etc)

Just asking

ant said :

If someone’s calling 000, Ozi, I’d expect it to be something pretty serious, like someone dying in front of you. I’d imagine that anyone calling 000 is in a situation that could be described as “emotive”. What other example could one use?

000 is for life or death situations, AKA “emergencies”.

Well yes, in a perfect world “anyone calling 000” would be doing so in an emergency.
However, for your reading pleasure: http://archive.audit.vic.gov.au/old/sr53/ags5309.htm

Of special note are the following points:

9.24 The National Emergency Call-taking Working Group, in its January 1997 submission to a Senate Committee on the Telecommunications Bills Inquiry, stated “only one tenth of these [the estimated 10 million calls to 000] are referred to the emergency service organisations”. BEST advised audit that the equivalent proportion of genuine calls in Victoria is likely to be higher at around 25 per cent of calls.

9.25 Of the estimated 9 million national non-emergency calls received through 000, approximately half or 4.5 million calls are considered to be due to accidental mis-dialling arising from the above-mentioned inherent problem associated with the use of 000. The remaining 4.5 million non-emergency calls have been attributed to nuisance or hoax calls.

As you can see, somewhere between 10% and 25% of calls to 000 are actually referred on to emergency services. The remaining 75% to 90% are misdialed calls, hoax calls or due to the “use of 3 zero digits for the national number which gives rise to a high incidence of accidental mis-dialling of other frequently used numbers prefixed by the digits 0 and 00.”

As someone who works in the emergency services, I have seen first hand how often the number is misused, either intentionally or accidentally.

I completely and totally believe that every genuine 000 call should be answered promptly and efficiently. But ant your view that every call to 000 is genuine is either misinformed or hopelessly naïve.

I’d like to see more information on this issue – which part of the call is the problem – is it that the call is not answered, or that the call does not connect? or that the call is transferred to the respective authority but then not handled?

I could imagine the “1 in 7” number to be quite reasonable if this includes calls that people tried to place by mobile phone but either didn’t connect or dropped out due to poor coverage. It would be quite another issue of the call was routed to the ambulance service but not processed. In the middle is the 000 call centre not having enough resources to handle all the incoming calls from the region it’s servicing.

If someone’s calling 000, Ozi, I’d expect it to be something pretty serious, like someone dying in front of you. I’d imagine that anyone calling 000 is in a situation that could be described as “emotive”. What other example could one use?

000 is for life or death situations, AKA “emergencies”.

ant said :

I’m puzzled that people are voting “6 out of 7 isn’t bad”.

So, your mother or your kid is lying on the floor dying, and your call is the one that isn’t answered, that’s OK is it? Seriously?

Obviously with such a blatantly emotive example, there can only be one answer; no, it’s not OK for that call to go unanswered. However, this issue is a little more complex than everyone’s favourite conservative Liberal MP would have us believe.

For one thing, he is bashing ACTAS over the ‘000’ issue when in fact it is Telstra who take the ‘000’ calls first up before diverting them through to the ACTAS Operations Room, from whence (yes, I used ‘whence,’ people) they are dispatched to Ambulances. Now he may mean that it is ACTAS who only answer 6 out of every 7 calls sent to them by Telstra, but this is IN NO WAY made clear by his little media release/rant.

Secondly, there are a number of issues as to why some calls aren’t answered, and ACTAS should not be held responsible for short staffing of Telstra ‘000’ lines, or people misusing and abusing the ‘000’ service.

Either way, it’s not quite as black and white an issue as your post may have us all believe.

ant said :

I’m puzzled that people are voting “6 out of 7 isn’t bad”.

So, your mother or your kid is lying on the floor dying, and your call is the one that isn’t answered, that’s OK is it? Seriously?

I’d hang up and try again. Mind you, if they were in extremis it’s probably too late even if the first call got through.

Don’t worry ant, it always happens to someone else.

Right?

I’m puzzled that people are voting “6 out of 7 isn’t bad”.

So, your mother or your kid is lying on the floor dying, and your call is the one that isn’t answered, that’s OK is it? Seriously?

All 000 calls are answered first by Telstra, then routed through to the appropriate state/territory and emergency service. The great majority of 000 calls are hoaxes, wrong numbers, misuse of the service (“Hi there, I think I saw a strange looking man in my neighborhood last week…”) or are made by kids playing around with the home phone.

Brendan Smyth would do better to focus on the volume of incorrect 000 calls, not the fact that sometimes, they aren’t answered straight away.

On a personal note, the 4 or 5 times that I’ve used the service it has been ruthlessly efficient and very quickly connected me to the correct state emergency service.

Spam Box said :

Only one in seven?

Whoops, thanks, fixed now.

Only one in seven?