How we check every helpline

A crisis number that does not connect is the worst thing this site could do to someone. It is worse than having no page at all, because the person calling does not conclude that we were wrong — they conclude that nobody answered.

So the rule here is narrow and absolute:

If a person has not confirmed a contact against the provider's own page, it is not published. Not greyed out, not marked unconfirmed. Not published.

What a check actually involves

1. Someone finds the page on the provider's own website where the number is published — not a news article, not a directory, not a press release. Their page.
2. An automated check fetches that page and confirms the number literally appears on it, including when it is only present as a tel: link or hidden behind Cloudflare's email obfuscation, both of which are invisible to a naive reader.
3. The date and the source URL are recorded against that specific contact — not against the organisation, because an organisation's phone line and its email service can change independently.
4. That record is what the site renders. Every contact you see shows its date and links to the page it was checked against, so you can verify our claim yourself in one click.

What happens when we cannot confirm something

We leave it out, and we say so. At the moment 9 contact routes are in our data but not on the site for exactly this reason — usually because the provider renders their number with JavaScript, so it is not in the page we can fetch, and we would rather show you nothing than a number nobody checked.

The organisation still gets listed with its website and any routes we did confirm. If a country has no confirmed national service at all, its page says that plainly and points to the international directories instead. It is a worse answer, and it is an honest one.

Re-checking

Nothing may be older than 180 days. That is not a target — the build fails and the site cannot be published if any live contact passes it. The same applies to a stated policy on whether a service will contact emergency services without your agreement: if that claim is made anywhere on this site, it must cite the provider's own published policy, or the build refuses.

What we are not

We are not affiliated with any of the organisations listed, we do not fund them and they do not fund us. We describe their services as they publish them. Their own site is always the authority, and every listing links to it.