Merging Thailand’s emergency phone numbers to 191

Gen. Chakthip Chaijindra, chief of Thai Police, says they are setting up a new emergency service centre to bring together all the nation’s mergence hotlines into just one. The whole of Thailand will have just a single emergency hotline – 191.

The call centre and emergency response system will co-ordinate responses to all distress calls for crimes, emergencies, fires or traffic accidents. The police chief says they will have highly experienced people answering the calls so that the right people are contacted to get response were it’s needed as fast as possible.

The intention of the new system is to provide not only a national call centre for police, fire and medical emergencies but also provide the same services for tourists and the tourist organisations. The police chief says they will provide the service in Thai and English as well as special services for the disabled.

Chakthip says one of the major problems for emergency call centres is the number of prank calls, saying that they currently receive up to 100,000 prank calls each year, wasting the time of the operators and delaying the process of getting response to the real emergencies and people in need. He says they are going to step up the tracing of prank calls and start charging people who make the calls and waste everyone’s time.

Chakthip said the centralised call centre is now possible because of the advances in technology. He also says the latest technology will make it a lot easier to trace the pranksters and purge them out of the system.

The new nationally co-ordinated call centre won’t be fully operational until two or three years according to the Thai Police Chief.