How would you call 999 if you can’t speak or move?

16 comments

1. Isn’t there something like you dial 55 if unable to speak?

2. “You now can’t speak or move. What happens?”

   You perish and your cat eats your pretty face

3. Worth teaching your child to call 999 for you and what to do in that situation, assuming they can speak and use a phone of course.

4. There is a police follow up for a silent but maintained 999 call.

   Pretty sure there is … when my kid dialed 999 from my wife’s phone they called back… if we hadn’t answered maybe they would eventually find out where and call around

5. If you groan, press 55 or can tap the screen the operator will stay on the line.

6. If you can actually dial 999 then obv you have the ability to hit a panic button of some sort

   Subscription services exist that can give you precisely that

   As for fones – I know that doro fones have a panic button on the back that can send a preset sms to contacts of your choice, and doro also offers a small button that you can carry at all times that you can press and it will activate the doro panic button on your fone

   I have a doro, and also have the tiny (expensive) portable panic button. Must get round to setting it up one day. Assuming it works, it’ll be way cheaper than a subscription service

   If you are proper worried abt this stuff then entry level is simply to get a subscription service and wear a button of some sort round your neck

   My assumption is that if you dial 999 and say nothing, they will cut you off as a nuisance caller

7. Fun fact!
   If you call 999 and don’t respond by either the service or the initial BT operator police attend your geo location or attached location to your number. Great safety mechanism for medical emergencies.

8. They’ll call back after the empty call. They get so many pocket dials that, unless there’s some reason to be suspicious, that will be all they’ll do.

   My SiL was a police 999 operator for a few years, she left due to ill health at the start of covid. I was surprised how manual and paper based their job still is. For example if she needed a fire engine then she had to get the colleague next to her to dial 999 and ask for the fire brigade. They couldn’t transfer calls internally or queue tasks in a system for other emergency services.

   Because it’s such a manual job you’re very much at the mercy of how good the operator you get is.

9. I answer 999 calls. If you don’t ask for a specific service (or say nothing) then the default is to be connected to the police for them to investigate. I guess part of that logic is possibly because your not in a safe place to speak IE you’re being held hostage, trapped somewhere, you manage to call 999 but don’t want to be heard.

   So I specifically work for the coastguard. One time we got a call from the police saying that they’d had multiple dropped calls from the same number. They’d managed to get some phone signal data to at least roughly position the caller. And he was somewhere coastal. They had no idea what was wrong with him. But they requested we attended because if he was stuck, our teams would have the skills to get him off a cliff or whatever or if he had broken his leg and was sat on the path, our guys are medically trained and can assemble a stretcher and carry him to the nearest road to get to an ambulance. Or if the ambulance is going to take too long, we could send a coastguard helicopter to take him to hospital.

   I can’t remember what actually was wrong with the person. But we sent a team and they did find a person who had been trying to dial 999. I think he had perhaps fallen over and dislocated something and was unable to walk. I don’t think his injuries were life threatening but he wasnt going to get out of the situation without help. He had very poor phone signal so it cut out within seconds of him dialling 999.

   So my advice, if you can’t speak, is to keep dialing 999 multiple times. If you’re at home you might only get the police turn up initially but at least they’re first aid trained and can then call the ambulance service for you.

   If you just dial once then all the police do is call you back to check if you’re ok. And that might not be helpful. So if you genuinely need help, dial multiple times as it’s less likely to be accidental.

10. The call-handler makes a decision, if they think it’s a pocket dial (there’s background noise of people chatting, rustling of a phone etc) they can cut it.

    If they think you’re unconscious or unable, they send out resources.

11. So (in our force at least) if we hear a request, distress or disturbance we’re likely to do further checks (such as requesting information from phone providers if it’s a registered/contracted number…which is a benefit of not having a prepaid phone I guess?).

    However if BT pass a silent line we ask questions such as “if you need our assistance and you can’t speak can you press 55” or “can you tap the handset if you need our assistance”. Failure to get a response to this would mean it gets passed to another part of call handling who would run further checks as above/see if there’s any history on the number or if that history is close to where the co-ordinates are showing to. Then based on what’s been heard, if a likely address can be found, dispatch will decide whether we need to go and send officers for a welfare check.

12. My baby called the police recently (not on purpose… er, I assume). I didn’t realise what number he’d dialled and just hung up the phone. They called back more or less right away to check everything was okay and I wasn’t in danger / under duress (and were very nice about it when I explained). Presumably if I hadn’t answered they would have sent someone out.

13. This thread reminds me of the time i accidentally pocket dialled 999 and the call was 30 seconds and panicked and hung up the call!? I don’t know why I just hung up. Then they kept trying to call me back, but I was on the train so I got a few missed calls once I was off, I eventually managed to answer when they called again and they sounded so annoyed and just hung up on me.

    I’m literally so embarrassed about this but had to get it off my chest. Thinking about it makes me want to tear my own skin off so you can all share my embarrassment

14. A friend has issues with collapsing and passing out – from a pretty young age his daughter was taught how to call people from their phones mainly Mum or close first since most collapsing needs an adult but not an ambulance so better to call a friendly voice who can assess the situation and not potentially waste a 999 call.

    Since mobile phone which can unlock on a face/fingerprint (an epileptic friend had a fit on the golf course and his friends used facial recognition to unlock his phone & call his wife) it means children don’t need to know the passcode and phone apps normally let you set favourites with pictures so children just need to know how to unlock the phone, press the green phone and look for a face.

    Also a recent story on Reddit said about someone dialling 999 and asking for a pizza to be delivered to their home address as a ‘code’ for getting help when in an unsafe situation – another idea to be aware off (that hopefully no-one needs to ever use).

15. “hey Siri call an ambulance”
    “This is ALEXA!! Call one yourself!”

16. If its a genuine thing that you deal with regularly, a panic button thing is good as a long term solution.

    You could call 101 and tell them your address and that you’re worried after recent fainting episodes that you could be with your child when this happens. If you call on a mobile randomly they have an area that’s not exact and will contain many residences if in a city, but if there are previous calls registered with that number and the call comes from within the triangulation, plus the recent/past call notes say they are worried about fainting, that could be enough for call handler to consider it a priority. If you are able to say a few words at all that cause concern they can request for a subscriber check from the phone companies based on the content of the call and perceived threat to life