PRANK CALLS HINDERS ST JOHN’S EMERGENCY SERVICE OPERATIONS

By Vonu LIBITINO

THE National St John Ambulance continues to deal with an overwhelming number of prank calls, hindering the operations of this vital emergency service.

National St John’s Duty Operations Commanding Officer, Mr Lawerence Steven, confirmed this, saying pranks calls are a major and daily challenge for them.

Mr. Steven spoke to Kalang News from the National Ambulance Operations Center (NAOC), where calls to the emergency 111 number are received.

He recalled that during the recent festive period, NAOC received 1066 calls of which only 10 were genuine calls.

Mr. Steven explained that 95% of calls to the 111 system are prank calls, which puts the lives of people needing emergency services at risk.

“If a prank caller contacts us first and a genuine caller contacts us second, then the genuine request gets placed in the queue while our call operators continue to attend to the fake caller.

Timing is crucial and if fake calls continue to come in and take up time, this could delay our response time and comprise the safety and well-being of genuine callers.

The National St John have and are using a specific method to address prank calls, as Mr Steven explained.

“We have our structure system that makes it easy for us to identify prank calls.

We get prank calls every day so we have been able to identify which ones are prank and which ones are genuine calls.

Usually when prank calls come in, the caller swears so when our phone operators pick up on this, they quickly drop these calls.

The genuine calls are transferred to our triage team, who register the case and then our dispatch team sends out an ambulance to deal with the emergency case,” Mr Steven said.

The National St John continues to strongly discourage prank calls to ensure that genuine callers and those in need of emergency services can quickly reach their call center for assistance.

Picture Caption: National St John Emergency Officers in the Operation Centre.