When an emergency call is made from a location on a premises that has on-premises (non-public) emergency-response personnel, the communications system responds by accessing a private database of information about the premises, retrieves therefrom information about the location of the physical location on the premises and best access to the physical location from off-premises, and sends this information to both the on-premises emergency-response personnel and a public emergency-response center, as well as connects the call to the public emergency-response center.