One reason is the public’s lowering the threshold to call the emergency number 112. It says Helena Söderblom, press officer at SOS Alarm.
” We have an increasing population, we have an increasing proportion of older people. But the new generation of older people are also more inclined to call 112. In the past, perhaps, rather in the first instance called their children.
Around three million call is calculated SOS Alarm receive in the year. Of them are around one million non emergency calls such as prank calls. They have become fewer, while the talks with demands since last year has increased by around 350 pieces on a daily basis.
It follows a long-term trend in the wake of growing population, more elderly and lower threshold for calling. A challenge for SOS Alarm at the same time as the calls in many cases will be more difficult to manage, ” says Helena Söderblom.
” It could be a språkutmaning. We receive calls in Swedish and English and we need additional help, we’ll connect into an interpreter in a three-way calling. And we have done about 6 000 cases so far this year. And there are over 60 languages, which we have interpreted to.
SOS Alarm for many years violated the alarmeringsavtalet that requires a medelsvarstid on a maximum of eight seconds. Something the radio program Kaliber reported on in the fall. So far this year is the response time an average of 15 seconds. It is at the same time, an increase from last year, and it is after the completion of the reorganization with the aim to shorten times.
treaty violations criticized by the Jan Wisen, deputy head of department at the Swedish civil contingencies Agency, which has supervisory responsibility over the agreement.
” of course It is very, very, very serious that the response times are much longer than they should be according to the contract between the state and the agreement. We are also looking at the staffing and skills. It is an important part of the operators who receive the calls have the requisite skills. And there has also been a problem that it has been a relatively high staff turnover for a number of years now within the alerting services.
the Actual roots of the problem for the parastatal, SOS Alarm is the scarcity of money, ” says Helena Söderblom.
– For the 112 operations, we have 180 million per year and it is a pretty big under-funding. We are missing about 70 million. We would need to be more operators. We are working with approximately the same number of operators today as it was ten years ago.
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