Emergency Dispatchers, 9-1-1 call takers, Operators, emergency telecommunicators…they are the force which connects Responders to the Emergency caller. A vital link in emergency response, coordinating communications between the caller and police officers, firefighters, and paramedics ensuring safe, swift, and appropriate responses.
Emergency medical dispatch has evolved over the last 50 years from a system initially designed to limit abuse of the emergency medical services (EMS) to an integral part of EMS response. Its goal?
“To send the right thing, to the right person, at the right time, in the right way, and to say the right thing until help arrives.”
Highly trained and professional, emergency call takers are communications specialists and the ultimate multi-taskers…with their desks bearing a striking resemblance to NASA’s mission control. With solid language skills and honed interview techniques, they need to acquire the right information from each emergency call. Master tacticians with sound technological and directional knowledge they also require a variety of soft skills to perform their jobs effectively. It’s important they’re great listeners, have clear judgement, are well-organized, compassionate and patient.
The job is challenging, with long hours (24-hour shifts). It’s highly stressful handling phone calls from people who are having, in many cases, the worst day of their life, and it’s not uncommon for them to bear the brunt of verbal abuse, or to suffer PTSD as a consequence of dealing with adrenaline-pumped and tragic calls day in and day out. Emotional control, a calm demeanour and the ability the “move on” once a call has ended are crucial skills, but the job can chip away at mental health over time, and sadly these telecommunicators are just as likely to suffer from mental health challenges as any other First Responder
RECOGNITION
The definition of a First Responder is “someone designated or trained to respond to an emergency, yet a disagreement centred around whether 9-1-1 telecommunicators are indeed “first responders” is still ongoing, despite APCO recommending the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) be revised as far back as 2014.
Reclassification of the SOC would see a dispatcher’s status go from “Administrative Support” (same as telephone operator or office admin), to “Protective” (such as a firefighter). Unfortunately, such recognition hasn’t been given…yet. As of April 2021, the "Supporting Accurate Views of Emergency Services Act" (911 SAVES Act) was introduced to the US Senate accompanying rationale that telecommunicators are essentially the “first of the first responders”. All eyes are watching whether this will be passed, since a similar bill was attempted in 2019 and failed…
This is not only sad, but unjust. Office administrators don’t help save lives on a daily basis. And what’s even more disconcerting is staffing shortages at emergency communication centers (ECC’s) are directly linked to this failure, making it impossible for any justifications to, wage improvement, work environment or training. Consequentially, those considering a career in an ECC often view the role as low wage, with zero upward career mobility. It’s also predicted that due to upcoming retirements there will be over 10,000 jobs to fill in the not-to-distant future, and not enough people willing to fill them.
END-OF-LIFE Systems
Yet many emergency call centers across the US and Canada and Europe, due to underfunding, are still working with end-of-life legacy systems and are no where near ready to upgrade to a Next Generation System any time soon.
How the right tools can help
The first question you’re asked from a 9-1-1 call taker is:
“WHERE IS YOUR EMERGENCY”
Yet contrary to public perception 9-1-1 doesn’t automatically know where you are in many cases, especially for indoor calls and multi-level dwellings like apartment blocks. If they can’t find you they can’t help you, and trying to decipher a caller’s location due to uncertainty or inability means time gets wasted…and time isn’t in abundance when you’re having a heart attack.
E9-1-1 and NG9-1-1 use the same location methodologies to try an pinpoint a call: GPS, Wi-Fi, and cell tower/triangulation plus supplemental data provided on a “best-effort” basis. Estimated search areas for mobile location slow down call routing and a Dispatcher’s ability to handle and dispatch help, this leads to substantially more stress for everyone involved and in over 10,000 US cases each year, death of the caller.
Provisioning Dispatchable Address, “The street address of the caller, and additional information, such as room or floor number” would alleviate some of stress which impacts call takers each day, it’s fair to say it would streamline the MPDS, offering faster arrivals to emergency scenes, and could help save thousands of lives each year. But don’t just take our word for it. In 2020 ELi Technology, alongside IBM, had the privilege of hosting a Design Thinking workshop with a leading112 Operator in Europe.
In essence, the workshop analyzed what value accurate localization brings to the delivery chain of an emergency call: beginning with the caller and ending in the First Responder, with Dispatchers obviously being front and center.
The overriding and collective consensus was that providing dispatchable address, would mean:
reductions in call handling times of 30-90 seconds per call,
efficient utilization of resources,
stress reduction for callers and call takers,
leading to more lives saved and a dramatically more efficient ESN system.
Sounds like something we should be thinking more about…