Email: Emergency telephone number

Mr Moran provides several paragraphs of detail on the various call routings, staffing arrangements and work-flows associated with the [emergency telephone] number, and berates members of the public for not having been aware of them.

This is crazy! How on earth are ordinary members of the public supposed to know of these internal workings? In an emergency situation, there isn't time to think and look things up. If a sign has 'Emergency Number' printed on it, people will call it and expect an emergency services style response. (We have specialist 999 services for the coastguard, mountain and cave rescue, so it's not unreasonable to think that the CaRT emergency number would be similar.)

From Mr Moran's response, it sounds very much that, in a life-threatening situation, the public should be calling 999, not the CaRT number. If this is the case, then a sentence to that effect should be clearly printed on any notice containing the CaRT Emergency number, to avoid confusion.

As I'm sure the West Midlands Ambulance Service would confirm, delays of "two minutes" or more can easily mean the difference between life and death. It sounds very much like the CaRT 'Emergency' number should actually be called 'Out of hours urgent maintenance' or something like that, not 'Emergency'.

In any case, in this specific instance, there's no getting away from the fact that it took CaRT's 'Duty Supervisor' over half an hour to get the entry code for a gate, preventing paramedics reaching a patient. What sort of records retrieval system do they have that requires half an hour to get that information? Scribbled bits of paper down the back of a drawer?

David Davis