How do ambulance responders find location?

[Jessie3]

Weird happening last night - dh and I were woke at 5am by ambulance responders who said they’d had a call from our address. We were asleep in bed. Ds, 19, had gone to stay with a friend at uni yesterday somewhere an hour away from here. Could it have been his phone? Logically, I don’t think that could be the case. Have messaged ds but he’s probably fast asleep and I don’t want to panic him. It’s a big deal that he had gone away on his own, for reasons I won’t go into here.

Surely their location services don’t just go on where the phone was registered?

If it's a landline they know where it is.

Not so sure about mobiles.

Yeah, that’s what I thought - we do have a landline, but it isn’t connected to a phone!

The use triangulation to a mobile of its a mobile phone or just use the house details( given and the postcode.

Have you upset someone recently?!!

In our rural areal our postcode is shared by about 25 houses and along a good half mile of road. Did you ask them the exact address they had? As unless they had your house number/name correct I'd assume it was someone nearby and an address error.

mobile signal is accurate is about 100ft, in a built up area, landlines are perfectly accurate (used to be an ambulance dispatcher).
if there’s no mobile signal but there is emergency service, I would have to question the caller until I could find an accurate (ish) location.
i wish everyone had the app ‘what three words’, that saved me some serious life saving minutes when people were hurt climbing / hiking etc

That’s interesting beyond I find What Three Words quite wobbly. It gives different results for the same location on the same day.

I can see where he is, @Probablyshouldntsay, so if it was his an hour away from here, the ambulance should have been able to locate it too, no?

Thanks, @Onlyvisiting, that’s what I am thinking.

We had this once with the police (told that a 999 call had come through at the address) - my grandparents a mile away had the same call about a week later - woken up at 3am. Very odd. I remember it well as they wouldn’t leave without seeing everyone in the house so God knows what they’d been told on the phone.

They did have our exact address, I think. I was a bit sleepy! And spooked.

It's on 3m squares so you only have to move a little bit to get different words?

If they have a phone call where no-one speaks or it is a child they check out the whole house.

My friend's three year old once phoned them.

I used to be an EMD. I once took a call from someone who had fallen in the middle of nowhere, on a mobile. I asked them to describe their location: He said 'I can see a tree!' 'Anything else?' 'Er ... a sheep?'

Police call handler here - if an emergency call is made and no request for service then it automatically goes through to the police and not ambulance so someone must have actually requested an ambulance.
From the police side, if we aren't given an address a landline will show exactly where it is, and a mobile will show the approximate location (sometimes very accurately but sometimes less so!). If it's a mobile we will then look at any previous calls from the number to see if any are linked to an address, and if not then we can check with the network provider who owns the number.

Sometimes there will be the odd landline without a phone plugged in with a fault on the line, although I don't think it would be this in your case as someone would have to actually have requested an ambulance for them to attend rather than police.

I wonder if it’s dependent on the satnav being reliable? I mean exactly the same spot, eg my front door.

What three words has caused issues for mountain rescue in the past as it can be wobbly. I've found when I've used it in some places if I stand still it will keep changing what it gives me.

The other, better, option can be OS locate which uses Grid References but oddly the ambulance service don't use it.

Are you sure it is inaccurate, and you aren't just in a different part of the house? My kitchen has a different WTW from the lounge, and from each bedroom, etc.

Years ago, XH and I were redecorating a room that had a phone extension in it. As soon as we plugged the phone back in, it rang. It was the emergency services saying they'd had a call from us. The call had actually been generated by us fiddling about with wallpaper around the socket, even though the phone wasn't plugged in.

Have you got a cat or a pet that may have knocked the socket? Or has something, like a spilled drink, dripped into it? Maybe it's a bit loose and it's got nudged?

Good question. I’ve just downloaded the app again to check, and it’s different from the very early version I remember. Now the squares remain constant and I can see ‘me’ apparently moving between the
squares presumably because the signal isn’t strong. I’ll start using it again now. Thanks very much.

That’s really helpful, thank you.

Yes, this could be the case, will get on it. Thanks.

Similarly my elderly parents were woken in the middle of the night by police saying that they had a call from a distressed child in their house, no child was there, only them and they let the police in to look. Numerous children live on their street though so police had to then go check all the other houses but eventually left. I often think of that and if they ever located the poor child or if it was just a hoax.