My grandma has small strokes from time to time, and in the moment, she won’t think anything is wrong so she’ll refuse to call 911. What’s the most efficient way for me to call on her behalf? Call my own 911 and see if they can transfer me? Call the closest police non-emergency and see if they know what to do with me? Call the nearest hospital? Do they have some sort of ambulance dispatch you can call directly there?
I’ve never had to, but according to this blog, you can call 911 and ask to be transferred:
ETA: Read further in the comments, apparently this doesn’t work from all states.
Is there some sort of county Adult Protective Services office where she lives? They might be able to advise you.
Yes.
In an emergency call your local 911, give them the name of the person, city or town, and the address if known where the emergency is taking place.
They will connect with the 911 dispatch in the area much faster than you will be able to wade through all the police phone numbers you might find.
In an emergency, that is. If you are just concerned about grandma, then you are calling for a ‘wellfare check’ and you should not use 911 or risk being cited.
Emergency calls to 9-1-1 are routed to the appropriate Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) based upon the location the call is made from. If you call 911 it will route to a call center near you. That center may, or may not, have resources at hand to find the ten digit phone number for the PSAP near your grandmother. Some centers are better about this than others.
I have answered a few such 9-1-1 calls relating to emergencies all around the world. Sometimes it is easy to find the appropriate contact number. Sometimes not. We’ve had calls related to incidents in Egypt, Jamaica, Honduras, and the UK among others.
I would recommend that you go ahead and do a little research to find the appropriate PSAP that handles calls for your grandmother’s area. Find a non-emergency business line number and give them a call. Explain the situation and ask what number you should call if needed. They very well may have a ten digit number that will ring in on an emergency line just like any other 911 call they might take.
If you need to make a call for emergency medical services then be prepared with basic info:
[ul][li]Full and complete address where assistance is needed[/li][li]Your phone number[/li][li]phone number of anyone with the patient[/li][li]symptoms the patient is experiencing now [/li][li]Age, sex, and brief relevant medical history of patient[/li][/ul]
I have responded to EMS calls and they were mostly preplanned just like Iggy posted.
However in a pinch I would call the emergency department of a hospital in the city your loved one lives and those numbers can usually be found by Googleing.
I do Psych transfers all over the State and have always found the numbers I need.
I actually have a similar situation.
I’m hearing impaired and cannot use the telephone. I have a cell phone for texting, but the local 911 does not accept text messages.
My husband called the county dispatcher non-emergency number during business hours, and explained what our setup was. We live in a VERY rural area and there simply are no next door neighbors.
I have a list of friends and relatives I can call should an emergency arise and my husband cannot call. They will call the dispatch non-emergency number and have help sent to me.
These kind people live in another state!
Talk to the dispatch office during business hours and make your own arrangements.
~VOW
You may also consider getting something like this key safe in case rescuers need to get into a locked house. I have ordered these for my parents and in-laws, and have set the combinations with numbers that all of us can easily remember. If there’s an emergency, it’s good to know that we can find keys, or we can direct someone else to the keys from a long way off. (Fortunately, my parents’ anniversary is the same day as my mother-in-law’s birthday - a numeric combination all of us can remember!)
Many PSAPs use a Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system that allows the entry of notes relevant to a specific address. If you are comfortable doing so you can contact your local PSAP and give them a combination to a key safe, a gate entry code, or other specific access information (ie the neighbor at ph#555-1212 who lives two doors down has a key). They can note such details on their CAD.
If you have a home medical monitoring alarm (Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!) for a loved one it is important to review the address information the monitoring company has on file. Some alarm companies are really good. Some… uh… :eek: are not (It’s the green house on the left on Highway 11… a highway which is 20 miles long :rolleyes:)
As VOW noted many PSAPs are not yet capable of receiving text messages via the 911 system. They should be capable of handling TTY calls though many centers rarely receive such calls. (I have never answered one in more than 6 years at 9-1-1!) Eventually PSAPs will integrate text messaging as that seems to be the direction that the hearing impaired community is going for communications.
Yeah, we ran into big issues with my Grandmother’s medical monitoring company, plus the local government. At one point, I lived across the road from her. She and I were the only two houses on this street - “Main Street” crossed the highway, became a little dirt road/cut-through for traffic, and our addresses were 123 Main Street Extension and 124 Main Street Extension. We had no problem receiving our mail, but no one ever picked up garbage from our addresses (and we sure did receive bills.) The city insisted that we were in city limits (we weren’t,) and owed some stupid tax. The county refused to believe that neither of us were paying for garbage service because we didn’t receive it. And more to the point, the medical alarm service kept trying to tell us that Grandmother’s address didn’t exist, they couldn’t possibly dispatch emergency services there, etc. I finally fielded the phone call one day, after Grandmother gave up in frustration. I told the company to add the following script to any emergency calls they made to this address: “Turn left from the ambulance bay. Cross Highway 341. It’s the first and ONLY house on the left. If you get to the blueberry field, turn around and stop and the first house on the right. The football stadium is RIGHT THE HELL BEHIND this house!”
Seriously, the post office could find us. Google Earth could find us. UPS and FedEx could find us. But the EMTs and garbage trucks (all local as hell, in a town of 3500,) couldn’t find us.