Designing an emergencies support line
Anna is a Crisis Response Officer, part of a national team which works to improve how British Red Cross and the sector as a whole responds to humanitarian needs in emergencies.
Emergencies are often unexpected. They take people by surprise and give them little, if any, time to prepare. Afterwards, it can be chaotic, stressful and unclear what to do next.
When we speak to people who have been impacted by emergencies we hear that support and advice can be hard to find. It’s confusing for people who they should call.
This was one of the big motivations behind the creation of the National Emergencies Support Line, to make it easier for people in emergencies to talk to someone and access what they need.
This blog post introduces the support line and sets out how we’re working with the Visible in Emergencies team to continue to improve this service for people affected by emergencies.
National Emergencies Support Line
National Emergencies Support Line is a free service for people to access support in emergencies. It is intended for urgent but not life-threatening issues caused by emergencies. A bit like a NHS 111 but for humanitarian emergencies.
The support line is a partnership between British Red Cross, Victim Support and Samaritans, conceived following the significant number and scale of emergencies faced in the UK in 2017.
The support line provides a single point of contact for members of the public. Those affected by an emergency will be immediately supported by those answering the call — made to a single phone number — and, where necessary, referred on to organisations who can provide them with the specific support they need. Calls will be answered by either British Red Cross or Victim Support trained call handlers. The experience for the person calling will be the same regardless of which organisation initially handles the call, as the organisations are working closely together to ensure a consistent experience.
Building on what came before
Running a phone line is not new to any of the three organisations involved. Victim Support runs a 24/7 free and confidential phone line for people affected by crime. Samaritans respond to calls every six seconds through their 24/7 free and confidential listening service available to people whatever they are going through. British Red Cross does not have a permanent support line but has opened support lines during a number of emergencies, notably during 2017.
Both the Victim Support phone line and the Samaritans service will continue to operate in their current form. The National Emergencies Support Line is additional to these well- established, crucial services.
So why the need for a National Emergencies Support Line?
There are some clear benefits to working in partnership on this:
- It can be confusing to people trying to access support to know who to call. By providing a single support line it makes it clearer and easier for people to access
- It currently takes British Red Cross up to 6 hours to set up a phone line. By working in partnership the line will be available 24/7 so people can access support and advice more quickly after an emergency
- Victim Support currently supports people affected by crimes, but by working in partnership it allows us to create a single support line, relevant to people affected by all different kinds of emergencies
How we will continue to develop the support line
At this point, it is technically possible to run the support line. We can transfer the line between organisations and we have clear set up procedures, agreed by the different organisations.
Whilst we’re happy with the technical and logistical aspects of running the support line, we are now working on making the support line as effective and beneficial as possible to people. There are three key questions we are trying to answer:
- How do we make people aware of the support line at the right time?
- What is the minimum amount of data we need to capture about people to provide an effective service?
- How should personal information be shared with other organisations supporting people?
We are working with the Visible in Emergencies team who have already started to learn about what we need to do to address these questions.
1. Making people aware of the support line
This is firstly about finding the right way to describe our service so that people understand it, and can assess whether it’s relevant or helpful for them to access.
It is then about where we promote the support line — using existing touch points or putting information where people are already looking. We are starting to establish relationships with organisations that people already interact with immediately before, or soon after, an emergency strikes. We want to promote the support line via touch points that already exist to provide a timely and relevant introduction to it.
We are building on the learning from testing prototypes in four rounds of user testing to identify the most appropriate and effective marketing routes. For example, how we target social media adverts and how we might spread awareness of the support line within local communities.
Finally, we need to establish easily repeatable ways to market the service. Timing is really crucial and we need to ensure that information about the service is available when people are looking for it. By creating tried and tested templates, we can update the general information with specifics about a particular emergency, reducing the amount of time it takes to market the support line in an emergency.
2. Deciding what data we need to capture
Not only do we need to limit the amount of data we capture to what is absolutely necessary to provide people with the support and advice they need. Minimising the amount of data we capture is also important for creating a good call experience for people accessing the support line. Our principle is feelings before forms. In other words, we want to make sure that the calls are really person-led, and aren’t side-tracked by our call handlers needing to ask for, and accurately record, lots of information.
We know that we definitely need to capture some information. For example, sometimes we will need to follow up with people after their initial call to provide them with further information they need. We may also need to signpost them to other organisations that provide the type of support they’re looking for, such as their local authority for help with finding temporary accommodation. More on this in the next section.
As a starting point we will learn from the experience of emergency call handlers. In addition to call handlers from British Red Cross, Victim Support and Samaritans, we will speak with call handlers at London Fire Brigade, the Environment Agency and others who regularly support people who have been affected by emergencies.
3. How we share personal information across organisations
Under the current official guidance and draft code of practice by the Information Commissioner’s Office consent is not absolutely necessary. The Data Protection Act 2018 states that during an emergency, legislation is legally more flexible to allow for better responses for affected people. However, when the support line was prototyped by the Visible in Emergencies team, people liked that the reason for wanting to share was explained to them and that they had a clear choice.
We will develop a consent based model. We will develop a clear way to explain how data is recorded. If we need to share someone’s data with another organisation in order to provide them with the support they have requested, we will give them a clear choice about whether to do this.
To do this we will work closely with colleagues in data, information governance and security to build a reliable, quality service.
Working in partnership. Working in the open.
True collaboration across organisations can be difficult to achieve, especially when you’re working at pace. To help us move quickly and be agile we have published an open product roadmap, which shows how the support line will be developed over time. Using a tool like Trello makes it easy to adjust the plan if and when our priorities change, based on what we learn from testing the support line in a real operational environment.
We will also continue to blog about what we’re doing and what we’re learning along the way.
