Emergency Telephone Numbers

Use of emergency numbers

In all areas, the emergency number is intended to be used only in an emergency. Routine and non-urgent calls as well as hoax or prank calls to emergency services numbers waste the time of both dispatchers and emergency responders and can endanger lives. False reports of emergencies are often prosecuted as crimes.

For routine and non-urgent enquiries emergency services in most countries generally provide traditional telephone numbers for contact. These are normally listed in the local telephone directory. In England and Wales, for example, where serious emergencies have a three-digit number 999 (or 112), the number 0845 46 47 can be dialled for NHS Direct, a non-emergency medical service. (In Scotland the number 08454 24 24 24 is used to connect to NHS24, the equivalent service). A similar non-emergency class of numbers is also offered by the police in most countries. For example in Austria, 059133 would be used to report a crime which does not require an emergency response.

In many areas, in the North American Numbering Plan, 311 has been assigned as an urgent telephone number that may be used to contact the police and other services to report minor incidents and historic crime that does not endanger life, to avoid overloading 911. Other cities in North America use 311 as a general contact number for municipal government or for reporting situations such as power outages.

The telephone number 112 is the international emergency telephone number for GSM mobile phone networks. It does not necessarily work on mobile phone networks based on other technologies. In all European Union countries it is also the emergency telephone number for both mobile and fixed-line telephones.^[1]

To avoid overloading the European normal 112 number, Sweden has an automatic routing of the incoming phone calls. If the local emergency center is overloaded the call will be routed to an another emergency center that's not overloaded, thus avoiding queuing of emergency calls.

Recently, the FCC has required that all phones in the US be capable of re-routing "1-1-2" to 9-1-1 networks.