[Accessibility of medical services reachable by telephone. The example of the 100 service of Brussels].

Abstract

The study examines in which degree the belonging to different groups of the population (groups of age, of nationality, socio-economics) influences the interpretability of the help's calls made by telephone to the service 100. The good interpretation of the help's call is evaluated by mean of the decision, good or not, to reinforce the ambulance by a medical team. The analysis considers the phone calls for patients at home. The analysis shows that the accessibility to the service 100 depends on: --the nationality: some groups of nationality don't call the service 100, or not often, because the use of the telephone needs a rather good knowledge of one of the national languages, --the age: the number of calls grows with the age of the victim; the under-evaluation of the state of the victim is significantly more important for older people, --the socio-economic level: the belonging to a low socio-economic group appears as a partial obstacle to verbal communication. The phone calls coming from the poor districts allow a less good evaluation of the state of the victim. To conclude, we may say that: 1. when help's call arrives to the service 100, the operator appreciates the gravity of the situation with a fairly good precision. 2. for people who don't call the service 100 because they don't master enough one of the two national languages, a better accessibility to the service 100 needs a global policy of integration of the strangers (language courses...).