It is 9 p.m. and a young woman and her father settle in to watch television. Getting up to make a cup of tea, she gets the fright of her life when she hears a loud thud. She finds her father sprawled on the carpet, unconscious.
All alone, the panic sets in. Fumbling through her handbag for her mobile phone she dials 112 but the line is busy. She tries several times, pleading for somebody to pick up... but no voice to calm her nerves is forthcoming.
This emergency situation has been fabricated but it is a crisis each one of us can face and the consequences are hardly imaginable.
Statistics show an unforgivable 33 per cent of emergency calls made to 112 between January and June 2009 remained unanswered. In the second half of last year, this was cut down to just over 22 per cent. But the drop is still not enough; in other EU member states the rate of unanswered calls is between zero and 6.5 per cent.
The European Commission is now considering whether it should take disciplinary action against Malta for the high rate of unanswered calls.
The police initially blamed the poor response rate on blocked lines caused by prank callers or people who did not allow enough time for their calls to be answered. However, it later turned out that one of the major problems was police clogging the system with administrative calls or to report being sick.
The severe shortcoming was first uncovered by The Sunday Times, which makes one wonder whether the authorities would have taken the matter so seriously had the worrying figures never been made public.
It is astounding how the Commission remains without any statistics and says there were none in the reports sent in by the Maltese authorities. One wonders why!
It has to be said, however, that the situation is improving. The Home Affairs Ministry has already taken the step to increase the number of lines to six from just three and, if there is a backlog, calls will be diverted to the Civil Protection Department and the Armed Forces of Malta. But do these departments have the expertise to handle emergency calls?
Certainly, more has to be done to revamp the service and people have to be trained to deal with callers who are usually in a state of panic. They also need to clamp down on the number of hoax callers. The Police Commissioner blamed youngsters in Paceville, who sometimes trailed telephone boxes calling the number from each one.
Malta could take the cue from countries like Belgium, Cyprus, France, Germany, Romania, Slovenia and the UK, which decided to block 112 calls from mobile phones without a SIM card.
According to the European Commission, in some member states, hoax calls make up 90 per cent of the calls and, while Malta may not be facing such an alarming statistic, the authorities should embark on educating the public on the proper use of the emergency number.
The whole scope of this single European number is to help anyone travelling across member states to remember to dial 112 for an ambulance, the fire brigade or the police when under pressure of an emergency situation.
The authorities are on the right track. The first step was recognising the problem, now energies have to focus on drastically cutting the number of unanswered calls to below zero per cent. Any seconds wasted can mean loss of life.