If you pick up the phone when you’re in Need, Hubert Meeker could very well be on the other end.

The 77-year-old Victoria resident has been a Need crisis line volunteer for more than 20 years, answering thousands of calls about everything from loneliness to how to find mental health services.

Sometimes he even gives people directions to those places if they’re new to the city and lost.

But he worries that won’t be so easy when the Island’s six crisis lines, including Need, are consolidated into one next year.

“To do it for the whole Island is overwhelming,” he said. “They need to have volunteers in each community who are there taking calls for people in their community.”

Local knowledge helps save lives, said Joyalle Bunyan-Maynard, acting executive director of Need.

Suicide calls account for about six per cent of Need’s calls, and people are sometimes reluctant to reveal their location, she said.

But Need volunteers can sometimes discern their location by hearing something in the background, or getting the caller to describe their surroundings.

This enables them to direct emergency services to the caller.

“That will be lost unless the caller is calling from the community in which the new line is based,” Bunyan-Maynard said.

Victoria-based Need also serves Sooke, Sidney, Port Renfrew and the southern Gulf Islands.

Alan Campbell, director of mental health and addiction services for the Vancouver Island Health Authority, said that’s why he knows the consolidated line will continue to provide good service.

“Need has organized itself so people know about Sooke, know about Sidney, know about the Island as well as Greater Victoria ... so a small version of a consolidated crisis line is already operating there.”

VIHA spends $900,000 on the six crisis lines in Victoria, Nanaimo, Port Alberni, Campbell River, Comox and Port Hardy.

Campbell doesn’t know how much money the merger will save, but estimates anywhere from $90,000 to $135,000 on administration and overhead costs alone.

“Telephone lines, various equipment, the need to do training, all of those things they’re doing independently, those are opportunities to be more efficient,” he said.

VIHA is encouraging the local crisis line to apply for the bid. But Bunyan-Maynard said the call centre could be based as far away as Vancouver because Victoria just doesn’t have a large enough volunteer-base to draw from.

She said Need makes up a social service tapestry on the South Island.

“When you take a service that’s so integrated into the community the way Need is, it’s like a moth got at the tapestry and it starts to weaken the whole fabric of the community,” she said.

VIHA expects to put out a request for applications later this month. The consolidated line is scheduled to start April 1, 2010.

lweighton@vicnews.com