Equality The smell of smoke began to penetrate the nose of a woman lying in bed in the middle of the night, and she couldn’t do anything – Monika Hämälä tells how she feels when an emergency call can only be made on weekdays from 8 am to 4 pm

Clock was just under six in the morning when Monika Hämälän his wife woke him up. The spouse had woken up to the smell of smoke. They wondered about the fire truck and the crowd from the window of their apartment building.

Because Hämälä and his wife are deaf, they had not woken up to the potential knockers of the rescuers. The situation was unclear and answers were difficult to obtain.

“Somehow the neighbor gestured that the stove was on fire. At least my boyfriend understood it that way, ”Hämälä says in an e-mail.

Later, Hämälä checked online from the Tilannehuone website that the sauna downstairs had caught fire. At the same time, it turned out that they had only woken up to the events half an hour after the alarm.

Case made Hämälä wonder what would have happened if the emergency had been greater. A sign language interpreter would have been a great help, as neither of the couple can read the lips, that is, the movements of the mouth. Hämälä’s mother tongue is a sign language in Finnish.

And what if you had to call for help yourself? The emergency center can be contacted via text message, but Finnish is not the mother tongue of many deaf people.

An experiment was launched in June, which also allows for emergency calls in sign language. However, it is only available during office hours, from 8 am to 4 pm on weekdays.

“It feels unfair when I don’t get service in my native language in my home country,” Hämälä says.

“We joked with the interpreter that I had to isolate myself in a padded home after 4 p.m. But that doesn’t work either, as there may be a fire downstairs. ”

Sign language the emergency call trial will take a year. The service works in such a way that the sign language contacts a remote interpreter who calls the emergency center via Kela’s website or via the 112 mobile application.

It is known that there has been only one contact related to real emergencies, says the head of the operational department. Marko Nieminen From the emergency center facility.

“It’s hard to start judging how well the service has gained awareness among those who can’t talk.”

Nieminen says that there are about 5,500 people who use Finnish sign language as their mother tongue and about 3,000 of them are deaf.

“This population indicates that they have had more emergencies.”

The usability of the service has been tested. At the same time, it has been considered whether an emergency call in sign language should be easier to find in the application and how much, for example, the amount of light affects the appearance of signs in a call.

Its instead, according to Nieminen, the text message service has clearly found its place.

Since 2017, it has been possible to send text messages to the emergency number 112, as long as you have registered your number in advance. Prior to that, emergency centers had their own mobile phone numbers to send text messages to.

For example, more than 2,000 text messages have been sent in January – June this year. However, there are numerous messages related to one situation.

“In the past, maybe a hundred or two hundred messages were talked about every year,” says Nieminen.

Deaf the association would like to be able to make a sign language emergency call around the clock after the trial. According to Nieminen, the matter will probably be decided at the ministry level after the experiment.

The Association of the Deaf has been pushing for this for decades, says the specialist Marika Rönnberg. He said the matter has been slow for technical and economic reasons but the situation is “improving”.

“The Emergency Response Center and other authorities have had the will.”

SMS service the problem is that not all deaf people know Finnish, Swedish or English. The mother tongue of many is sign language.

“In an emergency, when you have an emergency and panic, words are drowned even in Finnish,” says Rönnberg.

Proficiency in the Finnish language is deficient in some elderly deaf people. Some of the deaf have refugee backgrounds. In addition, you must register separately for the SMS service using strong authentication.

An even bigger problem, according to Rönnberg, is that the interpreter should also be involved in communicating with first aid, the police or rescuers.

“How do you explain in a foreign language how it hurts? Is the pain round, pungent or pulsed? It would be important for it to be referenced. ”

Monika Hämälä fears that the experiment will not be continued because there have been so few contacts.

“It is only possible to make an emergency announcement in sign language from 8 am to 4 pm, which is only a third of the day. So a pretty big part of the day goes dark, ”he points out.

Hämälä is also concerned about his loved ones.

“This system poses a danger not only to us deaf but also to the rest of society. If we happen to be alone when a hearing person is in an accident or has an illness, communication would be important for the rest of their lives. ”

Hämälä hopes that the deaf will have a remote interpretation service in a mobile application around the clock. In an emergency, the remote interpreter would immediately start interpreting and at the same time start interpreting for him at the scene.

“I don’t care how much the service costs, as long as I have an equal right to receive service in my own language in an emergency.”