Parliament validates experimentation of a unique emergency call number for two years

The bill also reinforces, inter alia, the obligation to routing emergency communications by telephone operators, after the serious technical incident that disrupted the emergency numbers in June.

Le Monde with AFP

The Parliament adopted, Tuesday, 16 November, definitively and with a rare consensus, a transmitted bill containing a battery of measures for firefighters, as well as the experimentation of a unique emergency call number .

After a last adoption in the Senate, the National Assembly validated, Tuesday, at the beginning of the evening, this bill, given by the member Fabien Matras, of the Republic on the move, with a unanimous vote of the 123 deputies present In the hemicycle. “We have reached a founding text of tomorrow’s civil security,” Matras welcomed Mr. Matras. “It’s a toolbox,” greeted the deputy Guillaume Larrivé, Republicans. “It’s a text that goes in common sense, even if it does not go to the bottom of a number of subjects,” said Ugo Bernalicis, from France unsuitable.

The parliament thus validates the experiment, for two years, a single platform for emergency numbers, as Emmanuel Macron announced last month at the National Firefighters Congress. This unique issue has been vilified by the “white blouses” as “a loss of luck” for the sick, with the backdrop of the fear that the preeminence of the doctor’s expertise is questioned. However, if the urgentists defend the use of the 15, firefighters consider that current practices are increasingly tending to reduce them to a role of paramedics, which does not fall within their primary mission.

Financial bonuses, easy access to social housing

Members and senators seem to have found a balancing point in joint joint committee with the experimentation of a unique emergency call number, but also two other models: a gathering of the 15th and of the 18th of 18 first, and also a group of call number of the SAMU (the 15) and that of the custody physicians, the SAS.

Taking lessons from the serious technical incident that disrupted emergency numbers on June 2, the Matras bill further strengthens the obligation to routing emergency communications by telephone operators.

This reform, which received the assistance and support of the powerful national federation of Firefighters of France, also provides for more beneficial financial bonuses for fire soldiers, or easy access to social housing, in order to arouse And to retain the volunteers, as well as measures to muscle the criminal response against the aggression they are increasingly victims.

A “dead for the service of the Republic” is, moreover, created for the dead public officials “in exceptional circumstances”, with a pupil status of the Republic for their children. In a sense that is in accordance with their claims, the bill also reforms “ambulanty deficiencies”, the non-urgent missions attributed to firefighters.

The measurement should finally result in substantial savings for departmental fire and rescue services. With 80% non-professionals in the 250,000 firefighters, the French civil security model is unique in Europe, although it is tried to erode.

/Media reports.