North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: Thanks to all--medical emergency under control

  • From: Justin W. Newton
  • Date: Tue Jan 07 13:15:12 1997

At 09:58 AM 1/7/97 -0500, Jon Zeeff wrote:
>
>I'd like to point out that such things can be an invasion of privacy.
>While person A might claim that person B threatened to commit suicide,
>it is possible that person A wants to locate person B for other,
>not so good reasons.
>
>This will happen if all one has to say is "suicide" and everyone will
>ignore their normal privacy policies.

I have dealt with this in the past and only given out the information to
the local EMS system, and had /them/ use the information.  I also did
things like call back the original caller to make sure that I had valid
contact info for them, etc etc  (gives some level of ability to track
things back if its a prank or harrasment or something.)

As a side note, when I lived in Chicago I had a similar experience to the
one mentioned above, (except I knew the name and address of the person
already), and it took a /lot/ of time to get patched through to EMS and
then to get EMS to actually believe me.  To their credit the EMS dispatcher
did call me back later to apologize for not believing me when it turned out
that the person's life was saved.

Justin Newton
Network Architect
Erol's Internet Services
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -