The Single European Emergency Number 112 is a mandatory common freephone number for all member states of the European Union that enables citizens to report emergency situations of any kind by dialling 112 (One-One-Two). The fact that the number 112 is commonly associated with the Carabinieri in Italy is purely coincidental.

The Single European Emergency Number 112 is free and can be dialled from landlines and mobile phones even if you have no SIM, your phone is blocked or you don’t have any credit.

In Emilia-Romagna, the gradual introduction of the service in individual area code districts began in December 2024 and will conclude on 1 April 2025 when the Single European Emergency Number will be active throughout the region.

The Single European Emergency Number 112 represents a genuine revolution in the administration of emergency calls which encompasses the entire technological and organisational infrastructure of emergency management. With the launch of the new system, all emergency calls - both those made to 112 and those made to the traditional numbers (113, 115, 118, 1350) - will be directed to the Public-Safety Answering Points (PSAP) which, after a brief exchange with the caller to confirm their location and needs, will route the emergency to the operations centres of the emergency medical services, the fire service, the public safety service and the coastguard.

How does it work

The operator of the Public-Safety Answering Point (PSAP) of the Single European Emergency Number 112 service takes the call made to 112 or any other emergency number (113, 115, 118, 1350), immediately identifies the location of the caller (in around 2 seconds) and, if necessary, launches a multilingual interpreting teleconference.

At this point, the call, together with an electronic file that already indicates the location of the caller and contains all of the information collected, is transferred to the operations centres of the various first responder services: emergency medical services, public safety, fire service, port authority.

Depending on the type of emergency, one first responder service (e.g. fire service) or multiple first responder services (e.g. emergency medical services as well as the fire service because the caller requires medical treatment) may be alerted, increasing the speed and efficacy of the assistance.

In Emilia-Romagna, the Single European Emergency Number has two Public-Safety Answering Points (PSAP), in Bologna and Parma, each equipped with 25 workstations, a major emergency room and suitable spaces equipped with technologies, offices and IT services to monitor the evolution of emergency situations. The governance of the Public-Safety Answering Points and the entire system is delegated to the Regional Health Policies Office, which is tasked with coordinating its actions with those of all of the other entities involved in the management of emergencies: the Police, the Carabinieri, the Regional Civil Protection Agency, the Fire Service, Emergency Medical Services and the Port Authority/Coastguard.

What are the benefits

The new Single European Emergency Number system offers a series of advantages in terms of the speed of emergency response times and the accessibility of the service.

The faster response times are due to various factors:

  • a new technology that makes it possible to automatically localise the caller within a few seconds, whether they are calling from a landline - thanks to the identification of their phone number - or a mobile phone - thanks to GPS-based AML (Advanced Mobile Location) technology. This makes it possible to save some of the time that in the old system was dedicated to identifying the location using the information provided by the caller (who with the new system only has to provide confirmation)
  • the possibility of coordinating emergency assistance centrally, for example by alerting multiple operations centres - emergency medical services, fire service - at the same time
  • Multilingual dialogue and the possibility of making silent calls or using text-based chats via the "Where are U” app increase the accessibility of the service also for people that don’t speak Italian and people that are hard of hearing or non-verbal
  • Finally, the Single European Emergency Number performs an initial filtering of inappropriate non-emergency calls, reducing the amount of inbound traffic at the operations centres of emergency services.