Dear Colleagues,

a meeting of the volunteers who participated in the pilot project aiming to help the 112 in Brussels to become multilingual will be held on Wednesday 1 december 2010 (from 12:30 to 13:30) in the meeting room of Renouveau & Démocratie (J-79 09/232 also accessible from Loi80).

The results of the project and future perspectives will be presented during the meeting. Volunteers without a badge from an EU Institution please inform Mrs. Helena FERREIRA RAMOS VLAHOPOULOS (tel. 61005) to obtain entrance to the building.

Please  let us know if you will come by using sending an email to REP PERS OSP R&D .

Best regards,

Panagiotis E. ALEVANTIS

End of the project «Help the 112 in Brussels to become multilingual»

A meeting of the volunteers who participated in the pilot project aiming to help the Brussels Fire Brigade to establish a multilingual 100/112 Call Centre, will be held on Wednesday 1 December 2010 (from 12:30 to 13:30) in the meeting room of Renouveau & Démocratie (J-79 09/232 also accessible from Loi80). The results of the project and future perspectives will be presented during the meeting.

The project lasted from March to June 2010 with the participation of some 60 volunteers covering 11 languages (Arabic, Czech, English, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak and Spanish). During the project volunteers were on duty for a period of one week each time. They were able to intervene via their GSMs in 33 instances covering 9 out of the 11 languages. However, the strictly quantitative criterion of the number of calls is much less important whet one hears the corresponding registrations. Every call that used the services of an interpreter helped solve a dead-end situation due to a lack of communication.

The impressions of the users (callers, operators, interpreters) are extremely positive and this can also be felt when one hears the registrations of interventions. Callers are satisfied (and often astonished) by the quality of the response they got from the 100/112 Call Centre. Interpreters feel useful for offering help to their «compatriots». Finally, the operators are happy to be able to use a tool that helps them fulfil their role of public service.

It must be noted that during the project that tool was made available to other services, i.e. the 100/112 Call Centres of Mons, Liège and Namur as well as the special emergency services and the emergency and mobile resuscitation services of the Brussels Region.

The Brussels Fire Brigade is actually studying the administrative arrangements which will permit offering the multilingual service on a permanent professional basis to all callers of the 112.

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