Emergency information in Kazakhstan
101 fire and rescue, 102 police, 103 ambulance, 112 for major incidents - all free from any phone. Operators rarely speak English.
Emergency numbers
All of these are free from any phone. Operators rarely speak English, so have your address written in Russian or Kazakh, or use a translation app.
- 101 - Fire and rescue service
- 102 - Police
- 103 - Ambulance
- 112 - Single emergency number for major incidents
Travel insurance with sufficient medical cover, including possible repatriation, is required to enter the country as part of QazETA registration and e-visas.
Calling 103 when nobody at either end speaks the other's language
The ambulance number is 103 and the operator may not speak English. Have your address written in Russian or Kazakh before you need it, and insurance that covers an air ambulance.
- 103 is the ambulance line, and the operator answering may not speak English. That is the single fact to prepare for.
- Write your address down in Russian or Kazakh - on paper, and as a note in your phone. A hotel card does this job perfectly.
- Ask a Kazakh speaker to make the call if one is nearby. Hotel reception, a driver, a shop: help is offered readily, and a 30-second conversation beats five minutes of a translation app.
- Facilities outside Astana and Almaty are limited, so serious cases mean distance - which is why insurance here has to include air ambulance evacuation, not just treatment.
- Call the insurer the moment you are referred, before admission if you can.
Prepare the sentence, not the vocabulary
Kazakhstan's emergency system works; the friction for a visitor is language. 103 reaches an ambulance, and the person answering may have no English at all. Trying to improvise that conversation while something is going wrong is the failure everyone plans around too late.
Three things, done on the first day, remove almost all of it:
- A hotel business card in your wallet, with the address in Cyrillic. It is the fastest way to answer the only question the dispatcher must have.
- The same address saved as a note on your phone, plus your accommodation's own phone number.
- A translation app with the Russian and Kazakh packs downloaded for offline use - the moment you need it is often the moment the data is not working.
| Service | Number |
|---|---|
| Ambulance | 103 |
| Fire and rescue | 101 |
| Police | 102 |
| Single emergency number | 112 |
Insurance has to cover the distance
Medical facilities are less advanced than travellers from western Europe expect, and outside the two big cities they are limited. The consequence is not that you cannot be treated - it is that a serious case may need to be moved, and moving people across a country this size means an air ambulance. Cover for evacuation and repatriation is the part of the policy that matters here, and it is the part cheap policies leave out.
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