I work in 911 dispatch, at my agency our calls are assigned a priority from 1-5, 1 being the most severe, 5 the least
1 and 2 are considered high priority, you’re getting all the lights and sirens and everything, 3-5 are low, on the police end of thing a priority 5 is pretty much just us giving information to them, not something they actually need to do anything about, maybe they need to drive by and check on something, and maybe make a call afterwards to to public works or something to have them deal with an exceptionally bad pothole.
On the EMS side of things what that looks like is
1- pretty much what you expect, cardiac arrest, shootings, choking, traumatic amputations, etc.
2- honestly most of the EMS calls we get are a class 2. Things people need to go to the hospital with some urgency, but aren’t in immediate danger of expiring on the way there.
3- these are sort of the “you really called 911 about this?” calls. Like, sure, you should probably get this checked out, but you probably could have driven yourself or gotten a friend to take you to an urgent care, it probably could have waited a few hours, and the doctors probably just gonna tell you to take some Tylenol and take it easy for a few days.
4- this is basically psych patients. Physically there’s nothing wrong with them, they’re just mentally unwell
Which brings us to the point of this rant: class 5- obviously dead people. They can’t get any deader, so no real rush. They basically just need someone with some medical training to go out there and go “yep, that’s a corpse” and maybe check up on the family member who’s having a panic attack over it. Doesn’t get much more stable than that.
As a result of this “Class 5” has also entered our jargon as shorthanded for a dead person. So much so that some of our local news stations have picked up on it, if it’s a slow news day and they’re listening to the scanner fishing for a story and they hear “class 5” they might get a little nosey about it (I have a friend who worked for one who told me that after I started working here)
class 5- obviously dead people. They can’t get any deader, so no real rush.
Okay, but who am I supposed to call if someone just died in my home? Does the coroner have a non-emergency number for me to call “Hey, my mom just died. If you could send someone out to confirm whenever you have time that would be great.”
It’s going to vary a bit by jurisdiction, everywhere handles things a little differently
The coroner’s office should have an office number and you can certainly try calling that. It may or may not be staffed overnight or over the weekend and they’ll have some sort of on-call procedures in place (in my county, when they don’t have anyone in the office, their phones actually come through to us at the dispatch center to have the on-call coroner paged. Generally speaking we don’t do that for the general public, just for police, hospitals, etc.)
Whatever funeral home you intend to use may also be able to handle it.
But in general, just call 911. I won’t lie, a lot of what happens after that kind of happens in a black box from my perspective, I take the call, hang up and police/fire/EMS go out and do their thing and I get very little follow-up from there. But they have the experience with this kind of thing, they know what steps to take from there.
I also get a decent amount of calls where my callers are kind of clueless about what’s going on, it’s happened that they tell me the patient is conscious and alert only for the field units to report that they are in fact stiff and cold to the touch and an obvious class 5, and the opposite way around where they’re sure someone is dead and when they get out there the person is in fact up and talking and seems to be in perfect health, and of course everything and anything in-between. So it never hurts to have someone go out there to make sure things are actually as they seem. And of course we want to double check to make sure there wasn’t anything suspicious about the death as well.
I remember I had a caller one time who had been transferred to us from a nearby county where she was located. She told me her father had just died and she was having trouble getting ahold of her relatives in our county to let them know so she wanted us to go try to make contact with them for her (this would be about a priority 4 BTW, emergency and non-emergency calls all get handled through our central dispatch here)
Of course she didn’t have her relatives addresses, good phone numbers or much of anything for us to actually help us make contact with her relatives. But I was trying my best trying to help her, asking a lot of questions trying to figure things out trying to get her to describe where they live etc.
But the more I’m talking to her, things just seem kind of off, so I ask her when exactly her dad died
It was like literally right before the call, she was still sitting around in the home with the body and the first thing she thought to do about it was call her relatives that she apparently barely spoke to anyway.
Which, fine, I get wanting to let your relatives know about a death in the family, and different families and cultures have their own funeral practices and such, but you probably want to do something about the corpse in your living room first.
So I got her back over with the dispatch for her county, both so they can do whatever they need to about notifying the coroner and whatever other policies they have in place and because her local police would probably be better able to run the information through their system to find contact info for the relatives than I would be over the phone with her.
I’d say the non-emergency number would be appropriate in situations where the death is expected or is discovered too late to revive (like an elderly person passing in their sleep)
911 is “dispatch”. If you need a vehicle to arrive for almost any reason emergency or otherwise (ambulance, firetruck, police) then you dial 911. If it’s not an emergency you state that as soon as you get thru and that allows them to prioritize your call if necessary. Non-emergency is typically for questions and maybe things like code-enforcement.
In many locations they go to the same place, but 911 calls get priority in the queue before you even speak to a person. That’s the reason to use the non-emergency number for a non-emergency.
Again, it varies, but a lot of places have moved to a central dispatch model where basically everything, emergency and non-emergency, is going through the same dispatch center in one way or another.
In the area I work in, especially after hours and over the weekend, a lot of stations aren’t staffed and everything redirects to us anyway, and even if you do reach someone at the station, often they’re either going to transfer you to us at central dispatch, or take down the information and call us themselves after they hang up with you. They’re not able or not supposed to dispatch much of anything from the station directly.
Technically those calls go behind 911 calls in our queue than calls on actual 911 lines, but luckily in my area our staffing and call volume are at a level where that’s almost never a factor and pretty much all calls are answered immediately.
So most of us here are of the opinion that people are better off just calling 911 for anything except for basic administrative things that need to be handled by the office at the local station, basically everything else needs to go through us so you might as well cut out the middle-man and go to us directly. And worst-case scenario we can’t help you and we’ll tell you who to call instead (you really need to be a major nuisance before anyone even begins to think about trying to get you in trouble for misusing 911 for a non-emergency, none of us want the paperwork or to have to go to court or anything else that would have to go with that.
Again, the situation varies a lot from place-to-place, non-emergency lines may be more useful in other areas, call volumes and staffing levels may be worse and you may not want to tie up the 911 lines, etc. so it pays to be aware of the situation in your local area.
Again, this all varies, but that’s pretty much how things seem to work everywhere within a couple hours of where I work.
Stuff like this is why I’m on lemmy. Did I expect to be reading about how emergency calls are handled in some faraway county? No. Did I enjoy reading about it? I don’t know why, but yes!
Still 911 or 112 or your local equivalent. Then they’ll decide. If they think a crime happened they want police there quickly. If they don’t, they’ll have someone come around when there’s free time.
TBF you can’t get more steady than dead.
I work in 911 dispatch, at my agency our calls are assigned a priority from 1-5, 1 being the most severe, 5 the least
1 and 2 are considered high priority, you’re getting all the lights and sirens and everything, 3-5 are low, on the police end of thing a priority 5 is pretty much just us giving information to them, not something they actually need to do anything about, maybe they need to drive by and check on something, and maybe make a call afterwards to to public works or something to have them deal with an exceptionally bad pothole.
On the EMS side of things what that looks like is
1- pretty much what you expect, cardiac arrest, shootings, choking, traumatic amputations, etc.
2- honestly most of the EMS calls we get are a class 2. Things people need to go to the hospital with some urgency, but aren’t in immediate danger of expiring on the way there.
3- these are sort of the “you really called 911 about this?” calls. Like, sure, you should probably get this checked out, but you probably could have driven yourself or gotten a friend to take you to an urgent care, it probably could have waited a few hours, and the doctors probably just gonna tell you to take some Tylenol and take it easy for a few days.
4- this is basically psych patients. Physically there’s nothing wrong with them, they’re just mentally unwell
Which brings us to the point of this rant: class 5- obviously dead people. They can’t get any deader, so no real rush. They basically just need someone with some medical training to go out there and go “yep, that’s a corpse” and maybe check up on the family member who’s having a panic attack over it. Doesn’t get much more stable than that.
As a result of this “Class 5” has also entered our jargon as shorthanded for a dead person. So much so that some of our local news stations have picked up on it, if it’s a slow news day and they’re listening to the scanner fishing for a story and they hear “class 5” they might get a little nosey about it (I have a friend who worked for one who told me that after I started working here)
Okay, but who am I supposed to call if someone just died in my home? Does the coroner have a non-emergency number for me to call “Hey, my mom just died. If you could send someone out to confirm whenever you have time that would be great.”
It’s going to vary a bit by jurisdiction, everywhere handles things a little differently
The coroner’s office should have an office number and you can certainly try calling that. It may or may not be staffed overnight or over the weekend and they’ll have some sort of on-call procedures in place (in my county, when they don’t have anyone in the office, their phones actually come through to us at the dispatch center to have the on-call coroner paged. Generally speaking we don’t do that for the general public, just for police, hospitals, etc.)
Whatever funeral home you intend to use may also be able to handle it.
But in general, just call 911. I won’t lie, a lot of what happens after that kind of happens in a black box from my perspective, I take the call, hang up and police/fire/EMS go out and do their thing and I get very little follow-up from there. But they have the experience with this kind of thing, they know what steps to take from there.
I also get a decent amount of calls where my callers are kind of clueless about what’s going on, it’s happened that they tell me the patient is conscious and alert only for the field units to report that they are in fact stiff and cold to the touch and an obvious class 5, and the opposite way around where they’re sure someone is dead and when they get out there the person is in fact up and talking and seems to be in perfect health, and of course everything and anything in-between. So it never hurts to have someone go out there to make sure things are actually as they seem. And of course we want to double check to make sure there wasn’t anything suspicious about the death as well.
I remember I had a caller one time who had been transferred to us from a nearby county where she was located. She told me her father had just died and she was having trouble getting ahold of her relatives in our county to let them know so she wanted us to go try to make contact with them for her (this would be about a priority 4 BTW, emergency and non-emergency calls all get handled through our central dispatch here)
Of course she didn’t have her relatives addresses, good phone numbers or much of anything for us to actually help us make contact with her relatives. But I was trying my best trying to help her, asking a lot of questions trying to figure things out trying to get her to describe where they live etc.
But the more I’m talking to her, things just seem kind of off, so I ask her when exactly her dad died
It was like literally right before the call, she was still sitting around in the home with the body and the first thing she thought to do about it was call her relatives that she apparently barely spoke to anyway.
Which, fine, I get wanting to let your relatives know about a death in the family, and different families and cultures have their own funeral practices and such, but you probably want to do something about the corpse in your living room first.
So I got her back over with the dispatch for her county, both so they can do whatever they need to about notifying the coroner and whatever other policies they have in place and because her local police would probably be better able to run the information through their system to find contact info for the relatives than I would be over the phone with her.
I’d say the non-emergency number would be appropriate in situations where the death is expected or is discovered too late to revive (like an elderly person passing in their sleep)
911 is “dispatch”. If you need a vehicle to arrive for almost any reason emergency or otherwise (ambulance, firetruck, police) then you dial 911. If it’s not an emergency you state that as soon as you get thru and that allows them to prioritize your call if necessary. Non-emergency is typically for questions and maybe things like code-enforcement.
In many locations they go to the same place, but 911 calls get priority in the queue before you even speak to a person. That’s the reason to use the non-emergency number for a non-emergency.
Non-Emergency number will tell you to hang up and dial 911
Not everywhere, no.
Again, it varies, but a lot of places have moved to a central dispatch model where basically everything, emergency and non-emergency, is going through the same dispatch center in one way or another.
In the area I work in, especially after hours and over the weekend, a lot of stations aren’t staffed and everything redirects to us anyway, and even if you do reach someone at the station, often they’re either going to transfer you to us at central dispatch, or take down the information and call us themselves after they hang up with you. They’re not able or not supposed to dispatch much of anything from the station directly.
Technically those calls go behind 911 calls in our queue than calls on actual 911 lines, but luckily in my area our staffing and call volume are at a level where that’s almost never a factor and pretty much all calls are answered immediately.
So most of us here are of the opinion that people are better off just calling 911 for anything except for basic administrative things that need to be handled by the office at the local station, basically everything else needs to go through us so you might as well cut out the middle-man and go to us directly. And worst-case scenario we can’t help you and we’ll tell you who to call instead (you really need to be a major nuisance before anyone even begins to think about trying to get you in trouble for misusing 911 for a non-emergency, none of us want the paperwork or to have to go to court or anything else that would have to go with that.
Again, the situation varies a lot from place-to-place, non-emergency lines may be more useful in other areas, call volumes and staffing levels may be worse and you may not want to tie up the 911 lines, etc. so it pays to be aware of the situation in your local area.
Again, this all varies, but that’s pretty much how things seem to work everywhere within a couple hours of where I work.
Thank you for your detailed response!
Stuff like this is why I’m on lemmy. Did I expect to be reading about how emergency calls are handled in some faraway county? No. Did I enjoy reading about it? I don’t know why, but yes!
Still 911 or 112 or your local equivalent. Then they’ll decide. If they think a crime happened they want police there quickly. If they don’t, they’ll have someone come around when there’s free time.
Watch me!