Often a call to 112 results in the participation of multiple Public Safety Answering Points and Emergency Response Organisations in the resolution of the emergency situation, often this will include the need for cross-border collaboration. In order to ensure the quick and efficient cooperation during an emergency, response teams need to work under clearly defined rules of engagement, using overall goals that have well defined the type and level of cooperation required.

The level of information sharing and interoperability between Emergency Services organisations (Authority to Authority communications) may greatly vary from country to country, and possibly within the same country, and this could include the need to interact with other non-emergency organisations. Additionally, the type of information to be shared is quite diverse, including simple voice-based information sharing, or more advanced automatic / manual data exchanges – including plain text, mapping info, multimedia data and so on- up to sharing full common operational pictures.

This EENA Operations document describes situations in which interoperability is key, and deals with elements such as standards, sharing mechanisms and agreements, privacy and security, and more, while providing examples of European interoperability implementations.

EENA would like to thank Mrs. Iratxe Gomez (Atos – EENA Operations Committee Co-Chair) and Mr. Bertrand Casse (Deveryware – EENA Operations Committee Vice-Chair) for their work on this publication.

You can read the document here.