Medical helpline 116117 or emergency number 112 – which should I call?
Recently, there have been reports of long lines in health services and the role of the general medical helpline 116117. Here's what you should know about when to call the emergency number or the medical helpline.
Victim Support Finland now available in the 112 Suomi app services
The range of services offered by the 112 Suomi mobile app increased on 23 February – conveniently during the International Crime Victims’ Week. The number 116006 of Victim Support Finland was added to the app’s emergency numbers.
Drivers: keep these things in mind this Christmas
As the holiday season approaches, we would like to remind all motorists about the basic safety of holiday traffic to ensure that there are no accidents this Christmas. Fintraffic´s Road Traffic Management, the National Police Board, the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom, the Ministry of the Interior Department for Rescue Services, the Emergency Response Centre Agency and the Finnish Road Safety Council will look after the safety of holiday traffic again this year and wish everyone a very safe journey.
Helping callers in their own language during an emergency
The emergency number 112 receives more than 2.7 million emergency calls every year. The person making the emergency call and the emergency response centre operator do not always share a common language. In these cases, an interpretation service is used, and its usage has increased every year.
You are abroad and you receive information about an emergency situation in Finland – This is what you should do
The Emergency Response Centre Agency's international emergency number can be called in situations where the notifier is abroad but the emergency is in Finland. The emergency number 112 in Finland cannot be reached from abroad.
112 Suomi mobile emergency application also available for use in other European countries

The 112 Suomi mobile application, which has over 1.8 million users, can now be used across Europe to get help in emergency situations. When people use the application to call the European emergency number 112, the caller’s location data is transmitted to the local emergency response centre.
The Emergency Response Centre Agency of Finland is part of the Pan-European Mobile Emergency Apps (PEMEA) project, organised by the European Emergency Number Association EENA. According to Emergency Traffic Specialist Dan Berlin from the Emergency Response Centre Agency, the project has created an architecture which will enable European emergency applications to operate across national borders. The PEMEA architecture will be introduced step by step in different countries. Finland is already on board in the first phase.
“With the help of the new architecture, emergency calls made in Europe using the 112 Suomi application will be directed to the local emergency response centre along with the caller’s exact location data. The local emergency response centre will be able to see if the caller’s location data comes from a foreign phone number. These features will start working once PEMEA has been adopted in the country.”
PEMEA is the architecture behind the application, so it is not actually visible to the app users. Users do not need to make any changes to the application’s settings. The most important thing is to recognise the emergency and make an emergency call using the 112 Suomi application.
“This improvement will certainly be a great relief to tourists as it can be difficult to communicate your location during an emergency in a foreign country. There is often a big language barrier between the caller and the emergency response centre operator, which makes it more difficult to determine the caller’s location. We are glad that now the Finnish emergency response centre operators will be able to tell if the call comes from another country’s emergency application,” Berlin says.
The 112 Suomi mobile application project was carried out in cooperation with Deveryware, core service provider for PEMEA. Digia Oyj, partner of the Emergency Response Centre Agency, took care of the app-related set-ups.