ICE – In Case of Emergency

This week’s tip of the week is worth five minutes of anyone’s time as it may just save your life.

There are two things you can do right now with your mobile phone to help the emergency services in the event you have an accident while out and about.

ICE – In Case of Emergency

If you have an accident the emergency services will want to contact your next of kin as soon as possible to let them know what has happened and where they are taking you etc.

Storing the person you would want contacted in your phone under ICE rather than their name will allow the emergency services to contact the right person straight away.

You can always store more than one person as your emergency contacts – simply store them as for example;

ICE – wife, or ICE – dad etc

Something to be aware of – does your mobile have a password?

If your mobile is password protected it won’t matter how many ICE contacts you have in there as the emergency services won’t be able to access them anyway. You can get around this by turning off your password when out on activity or engraving/writing your ICE numbers on your phone or phone case. Alternatively you can have them engraved on jewellery in the same way you would do with medical information.

Emergency Text

Another possibly life saving thing you can do with your mobile right now is register it with the emergency sms service.

While out on activity it is more than likely that you will be dropping in and out of mobile signal. In these cases making a call to 999 could be extremely difficult.

In these cases sending a text would be a lot easier as it will send often even with weak and intermittent  signal.

Not many people know that you can contact 999 via text – there is just one easy thing to do to register your phone with the service. Simply text ‘register’ to 999, when you receive your response it will ask you to text ‘yes’, and you are done.

Now in an emergency you can send a text containing the following-

Which service you require/briefly what is the emergency/location

E.g

Mountain rescue. Man mid thirties with head injuries. Grid ref – NY 329 282

Within 2-3 minutes you should get a response from the emergency services telling you they are on the way. After 3 minutes, if you have not received this response, assume that you have not got through and try again.

Remember – this will only work if you have registered your phone beforehand.

For more info check out – http://www.emergencysms.org.uk

Simple things that can make a huge difference.

– Graham