RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The President of the Republic of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, announced yesterday an initiative to create the first Integrated Emergency Attention System in the country, which seeks to integrate the emergency calls received by Carabineros, Firefighters, and the Emergency Medical Attention Service (SAMU), improving coordination between institutions and citizen attention.
“We want to give the final push for Chile to have a single emergency response system. And this single system will be capable of dealing with health emergencies, fire emergencies, and security emergencies”, said the President in a ceremony at the Carabineros Communications Center, accompanied by the Ministers of the Interior and Public Safety, Rodrigo Delgado; of Transport and Telecommunications, Gloria Hut; of Health, Enrique Paris; the Director-General of Carabineros, Esteban Diaz; and the President of the National Firefighters Board of Chile, Raúl Bustos.
It is a pilot initiative, born as a proposal of the National Agreement for Public Safety, which seeks to implement a single and integrated center for emergency calls and dispatch through which Carabineros, Firefighters, and SAMU are connected.
To implement it, the Ministry of the Interior and Public Safety signed an agreement with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and commissioned a study to implement the service, in addition to setting up a permanent working group to define where and how the pilot initiative will be carried out.
The objective is for the Ministry of the Interior to play a coordinating role among the institutions to guarantee its operation, through which it can promote agreements and define the role of each of the emergency services. In this way, in the first stage, the aim is to install a call taker level, in which the reception, categorization, prioritization, and referral of emergency calls will be guaranteed.
According to the Government, in the case of the Carabineros, there is information on calls that were not necessary or did not require police procedure, which correspond to 72% of the calls received. In this regard, it was reported that the initiative seeks to evaluate alternatives in two areas: to improve the collection of information by the institutions in charge of responding to emergencies in Chile, implementing real-time information recording systems, human resources management, and logistical support for the provision of services.
In addition, improving access to information, allowing greater knowledge of the operation of emergency numbers, how to access them, the cases in which the system must be used, and the minimum standards of care committed.
“We will evolve towards a single number so that people will have a single number engraved in their heads. They will find timely, effective, and efficient help in health, fire, and security emergencies,” said the President.