Can you bypass calling emergency services and call emergency contacts instead?

The fall detect function will automatically call emergency services if no movement is detected within 1 minute of the fall detection, unless it is cancelled manually by the user. There is no way to redirect so it only calls selected personal contacts, but emergency contacts defined in the user’s iPhone Health app will be called after the initial call to emergency services. Please see Use fall detection with Apple Watch Series 4 - Apple Support for a full description.

I suggest that if a fall victim is unable to respond to increasing alerts and cancel the emergency call within one minute then a family-only response is inadequate and inappropriate. Based on recent experience with my parents you need the emergency response to be initiated without delay and they would rather attend a false alarm, rather than be 5 minutes too late.

Doesn’t look possible atm. You can set emergency contacts set up in Watch. This does work as I have used to contact to my partner. Ta