Emergency call-takers and dispatchers face many challenges every day. This includes understanding how to deal with silent callers and those who hang-up before explaining the situation. Alongside, false emergency calls remain a serious issue, with people calling about non-emergency situations, prank calling or harassing call-takers. EENA’s two latest updated documents explore these situations and highlight different ways to handle them.

False emergency calls affect all emergency services, diverting resources away from people who need urgent help. This can mean the difference between life and death for someone in trouble. European emergency services combat false emergency calls using different approaches. EENA’s latest document highlights these best practices.

In addition, dealing with silent, hang-up, and abandoned 112 calls can be a real challenge. In many cases, such calls may be genuine emergency calls, for instance made by people who lost consciousness or who cannot speak because they are involved in dangerous situations like robberies, kidnappings etc. Facing the problem of silent, hang-up, and abandoned 112 calls requires the extensive deployment of operational procedures and technological solutions, detailed in EENA’s latest document.