Police can no longer assist elderly people who fall at home

Estonia’s Emergency Response Centre may no longer dispatch the Police and Border Guard Board to help elderly people who have fallen at home, ERR reports. From September 1, the responsibility will lie with ambulance services and local social workers.

The Social Affairs Ministry and local governments say the Interior Ministry has imposed an obligation they cannot fulfil.

The number of cases in which elderly people are unable to get up without help has been increasing each year. Under the new procedure, the Emergency Response Centre must decide whether to send an ambulance or a local social worker.

The new arrangement came as a surprise to local governments.

“The problem is that a local government does not operate 24/7. Many local governments do not have official vehicles, and they have not agreed on an arrangement like that used by emergency services, where someone must be on telephone duty on a Saturday or during a sauna day,” said Veiko Luhalaid, head of the Association of Estonian Cities and Municipalities.

If the person needing help is behind a locked door, the call must be made to the Emergency Response Centre again, Luhalaid said, because a social worker is not allowed to break into the home.

The Social Affairs Ministry was also caught off guard by the change.

“We do not consider this solution reasonable because it is not possible to end assistance in one system before another assistance option has been sensibly established,” said Hanna Vseviov, deputy secretary general at the ministry.

Police have helped around 600 people in distress over the past year. The Social Affairs and Interior ministries agreed a year and a half ago that this responsibility should be taken away from the police, but they have not yet agreed on how to replace it.

“Until the very last moment, we did not actually have information that they would take this step in practice, and we still hoped that we could jointly develop a much more reasonable solution,” Vseviov said.

Tuuli Räim, deputy secretary general at the Interior Ministry, said an analysis completed in May did not provide solutions on who should help elderly people in future. She rejected claims that the ministry’s decision had been made suddenly.

“This is an issue we have been dealing with continuously over the past year in order to find solutions. We have to start somewhere and then find the solutions one by one,” Räim said.

While officials in Tallinn are debating the issue, Narva has been operating a pilot project for six months involving welfare assistants who are called for help by residents and the police.

Helping an elderly person to their feet can be difficult, said Vitali Slepnjov, a welfare assistant in Narva.

“If they have fallen beside the bed, they need to be moved slightly so that the chair can be unfolded. If they have fallen in a doorway, there are different difficulties. It also depends on the person’s weight: the heavier the person, the more difficult it is to help them. On average, it takes 15 minutes to get someone back on their feet,” he said.