Written answers

Thursday, 14 July 2016

Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources

Postal Codes

Photo of Clare DalyClare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent)
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39. To ask the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources if the emergency services are using the Eircode service as a location tool for emergency vehicles in rural and urban areas. [21506/16]

Photo of Denis NaughtenDenis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent)
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The Emergency Call Answering Service, which takes emergency calls made to 112 and 999 numbers, has integrated Eircodes into their systems and updated their processes to enable the use of Eircodes when presented by callers. The National Ambulance Service have also integrated Eircodes into their Computer Aided Dispatch System and this went live in February 2016. The National Ambulance Service consider Eircode to be very important information in responding to emergency calls, particularly rapid identification of the 35% non-unique addresses in the state. Previously this caused significant operational challenges in geographically locating these addresses as some are quite isolated and hard to find without a  unique identifier. When contacting the National Emergency Operations Centre, a caller in any part of the country can give the Eircode as part of their address. This Eircode and address will be validated by the Computer Aided Dispatch System and allow the National Emergency Operations Centre call taker to locate the position of the patient’s property along with the location of the ambulance on digital mapping. The dispatcher will then direct the nearest available Ambulance to the correct location facilitating speedier access to care.

In addition, the National Ambulance Aeromedical Service also use Eircodes. Eircode use has proved useful to quickly verify and locate an address / incident location on the shared secure digital mapping system used by the Air Corps, Coast Guard and the Ambulance Service. This is particularly the case in rural areas where many houses have no house number and use the same Locality name in their address. As time is critical, a suitable landing site close to the incident can be selected quickly to co-ordinate a rendezvous between the ambulance and helicopter for the quick transfer of the patient to an appropriate hospital.

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