Who do the Ghostbusters Call?
@ 12:57 pm A small piece of news struck my eye yesterday and made me thoughtful. Theres been a restructuring of the 112 call centres into a national organization instead of the previous county-run regional units since the 2000’s, and the results have been a bit questionable. The nationalization of the Helsinki emergency centre has been blasted as the restructuring has caused and stated that the safety in the region has come down. Another question is the services in the Swedish-speaking areas.
Basically before you also had the police as well as ambulances or fire departments have their own numbers you could call for “less emergency” so you’d call the “emergency number” when the house was on fire, but the lesser number when the cat was up the tree. But now you deal only with the 112 with all kinds of nonsense. Which isn’t anything peculiar to just Finland.
The new reform into larger units also caused some problems as many villages and towns have similar or the same streetnames, and the 112 operators weren’t necessarily that versed with the area. So in 2002 a “middle aged woman” who worked on the west coast got a warning from the court as she’d directed an ambulance to the wrong city and a man with chest pains died of a heart attack.
The yesterdays piece of news said that the same woman had been fined in court for negligence of duty and stripped of her office, as she had cut approximately a hundred 112 calls that then had redirected to other operators in 2006. She had logged these as missed calls or wrong numbers. Apparently the stress and workload at the 112 centre had overwhelmed her - maybe the first mishap was a cause or a symptom, but the manager of the centre said that of course the “performance is evaluated”… Now I can understand this is a job that does not bring in profit - but now you need to remember that we are talking of peoples lives - so adding insult to injury and stressing the workers out when the job itself is stressful enough sounds they should hire comrade Stahanov.
At the end of the day, who can your stressed out 112 operator call?
Cliff notes: emergency services in emergency
That’s messed up. I’ve never found Finland to be an especially safe place, especially the Helsinki region. There are lots of drunken derelicts and potentially violent “ghetto” youth all about the place. The weekends are the worst. I’ve always carried a knife or other similar weapon just in case the police don’t respond quickly enough.
Reading this post, I can see that my fears are well founded. Thanks for the information Phil.
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Comment by James — Thu, Sep 18th, 2008 @ 7:51 pm
#1: Yeah, it’s a hard knock life here in the ghetto. I don’t know why all those people from Kosovo and Eritrea come here, don’t they know it’s dangerous???
Oh, and the post is not by Phil, it’s by his stunt double.
#2: Not kosher.
Comment by Anonymous — Fri, Sep 19th, 2008 @ 2:26 am
I don’t see Hank doubling for Phil, maybe Santa
Comment by Summer sucks — Fri, Sep 19th, 2008 @ 8:34 am
Apparently #3 concludes that, since refugees come to Finland, everything must be A-OK. No ghettos in Finland
Is it possible to buy pepper spray or mace in Estonia, or is it necessary to visit Germany for that?
Comment by Rich — Fri, Sep 19th, 2008 @ 11:45 am
Apparently #7 presumes what #3 has or has not concluded. #7 fails to see the sarcasm. #7 similarly does not detect the (intentional) generalization intended to put things in perspective for #1.
Furthermore #3 never said that everything is “A-OK” or that there are no ghettos in Finland. Good day.
Comment by Anonymous — Fri, Sep 19th, 2008 @ 12:50 pm
#7: Sure it is, but why won’t you buy a Makarov PM while you’re at it? It’s not any less legal.
Comment by Freeridin' Franklin — Sat, Sep 20th, 2008 @ 2:41 pm