Meetings with the Stakeholders
Within the last two months, the team of Key experts was engaged in the analysis and assessment of the existing situation. A series of meetings were held with the emergency agencies (police, firefighters and emergency medical services) in major cities: Belgrade, Kragujevac, Niš and Novi Sad over the period 08.05.-20.06.2019. The goal of these meetings was twofold. One is to understand what are the specifics and differences between the functioning of emergency agencies in Belgrade as the largest city and in other major cities in Serbia. The other goal was to bring closer to all parties the preliminary concept of future 112 system. This was also useful to introduce the whole project to them and to promote awareness on 112 system. An effort was made to present the benefits of the system and discuss solutions for common difficulties met on daily basis. Participants showed a great deal of interest in how the new 112 service will impact and improve their current activities.
The main conclusion of these meetings is that there is no major differences in the organization of work between agencies in the capital and other cities. However, several issues were identified that should be resolved by the new 112 system e.g. identification of caller location, full coverage of TETRA communication network and integration of TETRA network between all agencies, hoax calls and situations of overwhelming malicious calls made with the intent to obstruct the work of emergency agencies and calls in other languages.
Meetings were very productive and the project team collected valuable information. We are now able to formulate the main recommendations about the configuration of the future Serbian 112 system. These recommendations will be discussed with the Beneficiary in order to approve the guidelines of the design activity.