Red Cross Blogs

It’s good to talk

By Helen Gough
April 6, 2009 at 8:46 pm

How many of you know a guy who actually likes to chat on the phone for ages? I’m guessing not many of you. That’s how I knew that the new FESS telephone support service we started was worth its weight in gold.

Traditionally our FESS team provided a crisis intervention service, which sounds a lot posher than it actually is. The fire service or police would activate us, we’d make our way to the incident, do the best we could and then leave. That was the end of our job.

Following a call out at the end of last year we’ve now extended the service we offer to include help over the phone. What this means is that we can offer comfort and advice to people at any time of day or night even if we don’t have a crew working at the time.

So how did it all start?

At about half past six on a winter’s night I took a call from fire control to ask if there was anything we could do to help a family who’d had a fire that day. The house was uninhabitable and though the family had relatives they could stay with they were very shaken up.

I wasn’t sure what help I could offer from the other end of a phone line but thought it was worth a try. It turns out there’s a lot you can do. The fire had been started by the two year old baby who had accidentally turned the hob on, setting fire to the shopping that had been left on top of it. The father didn’t know if the insurance company would pay out as it was technically a member of the family who had started the fire.

There was nothing I could help with immediately but I offered to call the dad back in 3 days time after the insurance company had been out. He agreed so eagerly that I knew straight away that he had appreciated having someone to talk to.

When I called back I was really pleased to hear that the insurance company had agreed to pay in full (I take back every bad word I’ve said about insurance companies). We chatted for over 20 minutes, not just about the fire, but about how the fire was the latest incident in what had been a really bad year for the family.

Now, I’m no trained Samaritan, but I’m 100 per cent convinced that those two phone conversations made the family feel that somebody cared about them. You can’t put a price on that. So, in the eternal words of Bob Hoskins, for those of you old enough to remember the television advert, “it’s good to talk”.

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Tags: emergency response, fire, insurance, samaritans

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