This is an especially good reminder before the ACS national meeting and with the incoming undergraduate and graduate students who will be working in research settings. It’s associated with a Lesson Learned story, which is not hard to imagine in any of these settings.

- Ralph

Keep All Your Emergency Contacts Information Current

LLNL needs to be able to quickly contact and effectively communicate with employee emergency contacts. In some instances, important communications could not be made when needed because emergency contact information was not in LAPIS or the information in LAPIS was outdated.

Incomplete or outdated emergency contact information can delay and even prevent important communications about your status. While the inability to communicate does not necessarily prevent immediate emergency care, it does interfere with a family’s ability to respond to the situation.

Even when your emergency contact information is correct, there are two additional challenges to completing these notifications when the calls are made:

• People have the habit of not answering incoming calls from unknown numbers/callers. A December 2020 survey cited in a USA Today article noted that, due to the prevalence of robocalls and scam calls, 94% of people let unidentified incoming calls go unanswered (up from 72% the year before).

• There is no one LLNL phone number or set of LLNL phone numbers that can be made into a known caller by entering them into a phone’s directory. LLNL personnel make these calls using the phone available to them at that time and location. Caller ID will identify the number of the incoming call, but it will not identify any of these numbers as an LLNL number or an LLNL emergency notification.

Objectives of these recommended actions:

• Increase the likelihood that LLNL’s call will be answered so LLNL can speak directly with one of your
emergency contacts as quickly as possible.

• Allow LLNL to provide some guidance to the first contact reached (e.g., if an alternate contact is the first person reached, that contact will need to know who the primary contact is as well as other alternate contacts).

Primary assumption: When any one of your emergency contacts calls any of your other emergency contacts, that call has a high probability of being answered. Inform your emergency contacts that you identified them as your emergency contact and encourage them to at least check their voice mail after not answering a call from an unknown caller.

Keeping the objectives and the primary assumption in mind:

• Identify as many emergency contacts as practical (LAPIS allows at least 15). In addition to having the authority to make decisions on your behalf if necessary, factors to consider include
• The probability that the contact will answer a call from a caller/number they do not recognize. The greater the probability the call will be answered, the better.
• The probability that a contact will answer a call from any of your other contacts.
• Whether a contact is known to most/all of your other contacts and is likely to have the correct contact information for most/all of your other contacts.

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