Call for 112 centres

Johannesburg, 08 Sept 2009

The Gauteng government claims its 10111 centres have improved, but emergency services say the centres are failing and the introduction of 112 centres has become critical.

Khabisi Mosunkutu, MEC for community safety in Gauteng, says the decrease in the reaction time of police over the past year indicates improvement of 10111 centres across the province.

“I am happy to report that we continue to reduce the time it takes for police to practically respond to 10111 emergencies. It now takes us less than 30 minutes, on average, to respond to emergencies reported on the 10111 number. This is the lowest response time recorded since April 2008, when the reaction times averaged 102 minutes,” the MEC said.

Mosunkutu adds the department would continue working on decreasing the reaction time of the 20 stations with the slowest reaction times.

However, Emergency Medical Services (EMS) is calling for the faster implementation of the 112 centres, saying 10111 centres are failing. EMS notes the centralised emergency number has become an urgent issue and delayed response times will continue without the introduction of 112 centres.

"Services have delayed response times, which could result in people dying. There is poor co-ordination between services. Incidents get managed poorly and services over-respond, which is expensive," says EMS spokesperson Anzelle Smit.

The Department of Community Safety is scheduled to set up two Public Emergency Communications Centres (PECC), which will consolidate the more than 350 emergency centres handling calls and dispatching for the country's various police, ambulance and fire-fighting services.

The PECCs are being established in terms of the Electronic Communications Act, which requires the Department of Communications (DOC) to establish the capability and the Independent Communications Authority of SA to issue the requisite regulations, which it recently did.

Still no word

While the DOC has remained mum on the development of the 112 centres, it states “some progress has been made”. The department last year expressed hope of having a more comprehensive emergency response system in place by June 2010, in time for the Fifa Soccer World Cup.

Department spokesman Richard Mantu said the DOC was busy with the establishment of the centres, but failed to provide further details, saying more information would be made available soon.

In June 2008, the DOC said SA was still “on track” to have a single national toll-free emergency contact number in place by the last quarter of 2009, but has made no information available.

Mantu could not say if the tender for the centres had been awarded. The centres will be run as public-private partnerships, involving the DOC and the vendor chosen by the department to establish and run the PECCs. The DOC previously stated that calls for bids ended in early 2008 and that it was still appraising the results.

Vendors were short-listed and expected to undergo an evaluation process between August and September 2008, but the department is yet to report on the progress of this procedure.