The glue that binds the fabric of any first response organization together has to be their dispatchers. Communicators are a crucial factor to the success of any response, both internal and external. Challenging that cheerful note, the first element in an emergency to break down will be communication. The failure ranges from individual exchanges upstream to an inter-organization breakdown. It’s often through no fault of the individuals in the radio room.
The public is shielded from the goings-on at a dispatch centre. Media attention is almost exclusively directed to the action at the scene. Brief glimpses of a communication centre in depictions of an emergency fail to tell the story. Communicators have a limited opportunity to get it right for the consumer of emergency resources.
It’s not like ordering a pizza, thirty minutes, or it’s free. Or ordering a product or service online as is the custom today, where the consumer can take the time to get the order straight or return the item on slow time. Life-threatening circumstances, whether it’s a medical emergency or a life-safety issue, demands immediate, concise and professional performance. No exceptions are allowed.
Every action and reaction in an emergency directly results from efficient dispatching through the two-way exchange of information. Communicators are the most overlooked and underappreciated links in the success chain. Enough of the sunshine and lollipops.
I recently resumed listening to our local ambulance dispatch in yet another fit of nostalgia. Laugh if you want, you would think I got enough after decades of chatter from walkie-talkies and cell phones. Curiosity drew me back into the habit. For me, the practice started before EMS with a shiny new police scanner listening to my volunteer fire department in Lambeth, our provincial police and the ambulance service. Thoughts of multi-tasking evaporated, my interest is now reduced to a familiar topic.
Only a few voices still ring a bell, dispatch phrases continue to be rife with acronyms and codes. Give an organization a complex term and a couple of minutes to chew on it, and no one will come up with an abbreviated version faster than EMS. Most of us were working hard to keep up with the “10 code” and the phonetic alphabet back in the day.
TODAY, each EMS dispatcher is working in a sensory-rich environment to the point of overload. Surrounded by a handful of computer monitors, dozens of phone lines, multiple keyboards and a horde of mice at their fingertips, they have enough information on hand to resolve almost anything.
You can throw a curve at the folks working in the central ambulance communications centre/CACC (whoops, acronym alert), and they would have a solution in record time. Their collective workload far and away exceeds their fellow dispatchers. That’s not to say the other response agencies aren’t busy; they are. The workloads placed on the EMS communicators are hefty.
I have known several dispatchers that left EMS radio rooms to work in police and fire communication centres. They all performed admirably. None jump to mind that has done the opposite. Word must have made its way around the campfire.
One of the most frustrating aspects of dispatching paramedics today has to be the ongoing shortage of crews to respond. Call loads and offload delays with paramedics stuck in the ER’s, are driving ambulance crews, supervisors, and their Chiefs to pull their collective hair out. I can only imagine that stress levels are through the roof.
As frustrating as the sheer volume of work assigned to first responders is today, put yourselves into the shoes of a dispatcher for a moment. You are now the conduit for everything. What you know, everyone downstream needs to know. Think of communicators as a valve in a hose that restricts the flow. Instead of water, it is time-sensitive information at best, possibly life-threatening.
If the hose was full of water, you could open the valve and relieve the pressure. When the line sprung a leak, you could mop up the mess. For dispatchers, it is information in the line that they keep flowing. Sometimes there are critical messages, so it’s a bit challenging to keep a balance when people’s lives are at stake. I can only speak for EMS communicators I have worked under for a few decades. Politics aside, I am confident that the other emergency services dispatchers have industry-specific stressors.
Unable to open the valve, dispatchers and their superiors are left to develop creative solutions to balance the budget of volume vs. resources. A lot of the time, the reaction has only seconds to unfold to avoid terrible consequences. The buck stops in their radio room. Not having the answer in an emergency would leave the public speechless. Imagine a communicator knowing what to do and what was needed but nearly powerless to act. Now that’s stressful, to the max.
To the readers who are or have been responders, you get it. You know what a frustrated dispatcher sounds like “over the air.” To the public: next time you hear of an emergency, stop and think. Dispatchers have taken steps to receive accurate information from callers describing their crisis. They are using their training and following their guidelines, doing everything possible to get the responders to your door or the scene in time. When their hands are tied for any reason, they are the valve under pressure.
The communications centres are miles away from the emergency, out of sight. There might be video images available to some police dispatchers to add to their situational awareness in exceptional circumstances. The majority of the time, communicators rely on telephones and radios to paint the picture.
The mind can be cruel when dispatchers hear frustrated, scared or injured callers wanting to know why the heroes with lights and sirens haven’t arrived to help on what might well be the worst or last day of their lives. Witnesses and relatives can be frantic, sometimes vicious, pleading their case for helpers to respond quickly. Paramedics see people die during their careers. Dispatchers listen to patients, crime, and fire victims die during theirs. I can hear the tension in the communicators’ voices over the radio as I type today. Can you imagine?
Dispatchers seldom get the recognition they are due. That is especially true in our current climate. Our county paramedic service acknowledges the dispatchers and responders annually at the “Celebration of Life” for their participation in cardiac arrest survival situations. My sincere thanks to all the champions slugging it out in front of your consoles.