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Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2005] East Anglian Ambulance Service have launched a national In case of Emergency (ICE) campaign with the support of Falklands war hero Simon Weston and in association with Vodafone's annual life savers award. The idea is that you store the word I C E in your mobile phone address book, and against it enter the number of the person you would want to be contacted In Case of Emergency. In an emergency situation ambulance and hospital staff will then be able to quickly find out who your next of kin are and be able to contact them. It's so simple that everyone can do it. Please do. Please will you also forward this to everybody in your address book, it won't take too many 'forwards' before everybody will know about this. It really could save your life. For more than one contact name ICE1, ICE2, ICE3 etc Origins: One of the difficulties long faced by emergency services personnel is how to locate next of kin for (or obtain other necessary information about) a victim who is unconscious, dead, or otherwise unable to respond to questions. Even if the victim is carrying one or more forms of identification which have remained with him (such as a driver's license), those items don't necessarily provide information about where and how relatives or other interested parties can be reached, resulting in delays as officials try to track those people down through ancillary details. This issue has been addressed through a variety of means over the years, as many people have taken to carrying lists of emergency contacts (and vital medical details) in their purses and wallets, or wearing items such as bracelets and necklaces with such information engraved on them. Now, Bob Brotchie, a paramedic who works as a clinical team leader for the East Anglian Ambulance NHS Trust has launched a campaign (sponsored by Vodafone's annual Life Savers Awards) to get people to store In Case of Emergency (ICE) information in items that have become ubiquitous in many parts of the world: cell phones. The scheme proposes that people enter ICE information into the address books of their cell phones, whence it can be retrieved by emergency workers. (This campaign is not a result of the July 2005 terrorist bombings in London; it was underway well before those attacks occurred.) According to Vodafone: [R]esearch carried out by Vodafone that shows more than 75 per cent of people carry no details of who they would like telephoned following a serious accident.Bob, 41, who has been a paramedic for 13 years, said: I was reflecting on some of the calls I’ve attended at the roadside where I had to look through the mobile phone contacts struggling for information on a shocked or injured person.It's difficult to know who to call. Someone might have mum in their phone book but that doesn't mean they'd want them contacted in an emergency. Almost everyone carries a mobile phone now, and with ICE we'd know immediately who to contact and what number to ring. The person may even know of their medical history.Some drawbacks to the proposed scheme come to mind: The cell phone has to remain with the victim (or otherwise be identifiable as his) in order to be of use. While most wallets and purses will contain some items bearing photographs that can be matched to their owners (such as driver's licenses), a cell phone doesn't necessarily provide any direct means of identifying its owner. And while any form of ID can become separated from the person bearing it, a cell phone is an object frequently carried in hand, greatly increasing the chances of its loss in an accident.A cell phone can be damaged to the point that information stored in (or through) it is no longer retrievable. This is also true of other forms of identification (a piece of paper or a card can be rendered unreadable by fire or water damage), but non-electronic devices will generally survive falls or impacts that might otherwise render cell phones non-functional.Cell phones come in many different brands and varieties, and how to retrieve stored information may not be immediately apparent to someone trying to work with an unfamiliar type of phone. As well, many cell phone users secure their phones with PINs to prevent unauthorized use, a factor which could conceivably block any attempts by emergency personnel to retrieve information from them.There are some other ancillary points about this scheme we should make as well:
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