Years ago, I found myself in an exceedingly remote backwater of Central Africa for work; it was fairly safe to state that I was the only person within a hundred mile radius who wasn’t born there.
As I stop at an intersection, some guy I’ve never seen before walks up to the car and excitedly tells me «Mr. $MY_NAME, you must phone home immediately!»
Puzzled (and worried!) I asked him how he knew my name - turned out the local radio station had announced that if anyone saw the tall, white guy - tell him to phone home!
No less worried, I thanked him and drove off to find a phone.
Turned out my grandmother (bless her!) had decided to give me a call just to chat; she’d rung up my employer asking how to get hold of me; he’d called the local contractor, they had realized I was out and about and after a few more delegations, all involved assumed it was urgent and pushed the big, red button.
When I finally got someone at home on the line, half panicked, it felt absurd when my father just said «Oh, your grandmother wondered how you were doing down there; I’ll fetch her...»
My grandmother? To her dying day, she couldn’t make up her mind whether this was the most embarrassing or most hilarious experience of her life - the day she made all of Owando look out for her grandson...
Awesome! I lived in Bangui, Central African Republic, for a few years and used to listen to "Radio Rural" every day (mostly for the music, but also to improve my Sango). One of the highlights of daily programming were the lists of messages that people were trying to get to relatives in distant villages. It was a pretty steady stream about the health of family members and requests for different things.
Asking someone to find the "tall, white guy" would not have been out of place!
That's awesome! We kindof have a more targeted system (for example, Amber Alerts), but it seems like something very similar.
This makes me wonder if the mobile carriers and phone OS manufacturers could collaborate on a similar type of targeted system. Let's assume that an accredited healthcare provider has an emergent patient. The patient has been identified, and a name of a friend/relative/etc. has been provided, but no contact information is available[0].
In a situation like this, the healthcare provider would provide to the mobile carriers & OS manufacturers the patient's name, the relative's name (with an indicator if spelling is correct or guessed), and the provider's contact info. The carriers/manufacturers could then check their user/subscriber lists for anyone with either a matching or a similar (using something like SOUNDEX) name, building a list of candidate recipients.
The candidate recipients would be notified via a free SMS, push message, or similar. The patient would give explicit permission for this action to be performed, knowing that a limited number of random people would get notified. Finally—and importantly—the provider (and the patient) would not get any information on who (if anyone) was notified. Each candidate recipient would get a unique verification code, which they would provide if they chose to call in. That would reveal the name and contact info of the recipient who is calling in. It may also help prevent multiple unrelated people from calling in (by detecting code reuse).
I like this idea. It’s cute and thinks about the privacy of the people involved.
However I do not know how many times this would be useful at all? How often are relatives known, but contact information is unknown? In the developed world at least, because I do not think this system would be of much use elsewhere. And if the patient opts into it, then the patient could also simply hand a phone number or three.
It would also be really expensive, wouldn’t it? I don’t see a huge market for it, so performing the service for a dollar doesn’t sound good. I’m not sure if a patient would be okay with spending several hundred on both the service and someone to handle the phone calls. You could use a robot to handle that.
Still, I think a patient could just leave a phone number if they decide to opt in anyway. But it’s a nice and helpful idea!
I have emergency contacts on my phone. You can access them, together with my medical information, without having to unlock my phone. A simple system that works.
What ethical concerns do you face doing this for someone who has not consented?
What if the patient didn't want their family to be reached?
What if the patient has been trying to escape an abusive family and you're leading them straight back to the patient!
I always wonder when my local police force Tweets 'missing person' and I think 'what the fuck if they were trying to escape an abusive partner!!'. Or what if they just don't want to be found by anyone for some reason that's none of your business.
I'm not sure police or hospitals should be going around asking after anyone who's an adult who hasn't consented.
Those are edge cases. Disappearing and living off the grid is not a sustainable or sane way to escape an abusive relationship, and (if you're an attractive white woman) can escalate to national manhunts which just piss everybody off in the end, least of all your abusive partner.
Abruptly disappearing is a behavioral pattern more common among the mentally ill than abuse victims, in which case alerting family is probably the most ethical thing one could possibly do. (If anything, the family themselves might not want to be contacted-- "oh, god, him again?")
> I'm not sure police or hospitals should be going around asking after anyone who's an adult who hasn't consented.
Everyone is someone's child, or parent. For the sake of a minority of lone wolves who just want to be left alone, why expect the rest of society to die alone in their hospital beds? Not everybody can even give consent, or are mentally sound enough to to do.
The most human thing we can do is to try to connect patients with their families, even if it goes wrong a small fraction of the time.
There's no correct answer, so I think you do the best you can with the information you have. Most of the time, people want their family to be notified in case of emergency so I would think that would be the default course of action. I'd be more troubled by a hospital or doctor making medical decisions for me without trying to contact family.
How would you handle it? Say you are in a park and you see somebody drop from an apparent heart attack. Do you start CPR or do you stand there wondering if maybe they have a do-not-resuscitate order on file somewhere?
The stranger memorizing the license plate from a single announcement on the radio and then finding that car on the street to deliver news of a sick kid is a fantastic story.
It's hard to imagine for someone brought up in the age of the information overload just how starved people were back then for entertainment and news. I remember the anxiety with which I waited a whole week for my favorite (and only) cartoon I could watch on the national television (the only TV station available). It was a Japanese show called Spaceship Sagittarius and the episodes are forever burned into my memory down to the planet names the protagonists were visiting, minor characters and plot twists. Back in the 50s, I could imagine thousands of people memorizing a license plate announced on the radio, and the story of the SOSes becoming talking subjects in the local pub.
It used to encode the town or part of a city, now it gives a region that could be anywhere in several counties based on the nearest DVLA local office (now all closed).
Granddad (born in 39) told me his childhood home didn't even have a radio. Granted they were unskilled labour, but in my mind not having any news is still weird.
I remember a few of those being read out when I was young. I thought it was funny at the time, but it must have been terrifying to have someone personally address you over national radio.
I'm like 99% sure I listened to it, but unfortunately I didn't make a copy probably because I listened to it on the broadcast radio rather than download.
(NB: The BBC makes thousands of hours of radio archives available, including the entire In Our Time archive, for example, but the policy depends on genre and rights so it's not blanket coverage.)
As I stop at an intersection, some guy I’ve never seen before walks up to the car and excitedly tells me «Mr. $MY_NAME, you must phone home immediately!»
Puzzled (and worried!) I asked him how he knew my name - turned out the local radio station had announced that if anyone saw the tall, white guy - tell him to phone home!
No less worried, I thanked him and drove off to find a phone.
Turned out my grandmother (bless her!) had decided to give me a call just to chat; she’d rung up my employer asking how to get hold of me; he’d called the local contractor, they had realized I was out and about and after a few more delegations, all involved assumed it was urgent and pushed the big, red button.
When I finally got someone at home on the line, half panicked, it felt absurd when my father just said «Oh, your grandmother wondered how you were doing down there; I’ll fetch her...»
My grandmother? To her dying day, she couldn’t make up her mind whether this was the most embarrassing or most hilarious experience of her life - the day she made all of Owando look out for her grandson...
Probably both.