Most people know to dial 911 for emergencies and 411 for directory
assistance, but dialing 211 for non-emergency help is news
to many. A Texas A&M University health and community planning
professor is studying how people use 211 resources to discover
ways to make these resources even more useful to their communities.
“211 numbers are administered by local agencies like United
Way and provide a central information and referral network for
any non-emergency need that arises in their communities,” says
Sherry Bame, a professor of urban planning affiliated with the
College of Architecture’s Hazard Reduction and Recovery
Center. “Trained staff members answer 211 calls for assistance,
then log the calls into a database that can be analyzed to evaluate
the nature and level of a community's unmet needs.”
Since 2001, Bame has been working with the Brazos Valley regional
211 provider.
“The first database, covering the year 2001, logged 1,800
calls, but in 2004, local 211 operators answered 10,000 calls
in the Brazos Valley's seven county area, a region larger than
the entire state of Connecticut,” she says. She compares
those figures to more than 100,000 such 211 calls fielded each
year for the Houston area.
Texas’ 211 network is unique in that all 25 of its 211
regions are connected with network hardware and mutually accessible
databases.
“It all comes together during a disaster,” Bame
says. “For example, during the current crises caused by
hurricanes Katrina and Rita, as 211 centers became non-operational
in coastal areas, their calls could be automatically rolled over
to 211 operators in any part of the state. In fact, my students
and I are currently pursuing funding to analyze the data collected
on the hurricane evacuees to determine Texas communities' unmet
needs during disasters.”
Bame's analysis can eventually help plan to meet healthcare
and other community needs that currently are not being taken
care of by area providers.
“There are two thrusts to such planning opportunities,” Bame
says. “Disaster planning to date has centered on mitigation
and management but very little on determining what needs were
not met during the crisis. So, planners don't really know access
barriers or who is at risk for having unmet needs beyond food,
shelter, and emergency care.
“Our analysis right now is further complicated by the
fact that the way calls have been entered is not uniform. We
need information about the time of each call and about each caller's
location, age, income, program eligibility, race and gender.
If such information is properly logged, then we can use keywords
to search the database for what we want to know. Right now, the
data from Katrina and Rita is still sitting on the paper coding
forms filled out by the volunteers who were called in to help
with the crisis; it will probably be into this summer before
we have it all logged into the computer and ready to analyze.”
When she finally gets into the data, Bame expects to be able
to draw some conclusions about how to better prepare for disasters
by learning what needs were not met during the recent hurricane
crises, then using that information to plan how to close those
service gaps.
“I believe we could use data from 211 calls as a real-time
monitor of needs during disasters, evacuations and recoveries,” Bame
says.
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