We serve a population of about 57,000 spread out over 100 square miles of land and a much larger area of open ocean.
When the phones are not ringing we can do some administrative work or training. If all has run out then sit and wait for the phone to ring.
One of the primary administrative duties for some centers in the US is entering data into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database. This is particularly so for centers that are managed as a part of the police department. Larger centers may have administrative staff who are dedicated to such duties.
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How big should a fire be before you need to call the emergency services?
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The general answer to this is “anything bigger than a small bathroom trash basket.” A fire can go from smoldering to flashover in one or two minutes. I’ve been involved with some of these demonstrations, and there is no time to second-guess or debate calling 911. Firefighters would much rather arrive to a small fire than to one so far along that all they can do is try to keep it from spreading to the neighborhood.
I’ll parse this question a couple of different ways.
Very few are actual pranks or malicious calls, far less than 1%. Prank calls from kids tend to report something very dramatic, but it is suspicious that we only get the one call reporting the alleged incident. (One prank claimed a car crashed and hit a gas pump causing an explosion. If that really happened then every line we have would have been ringing.)
But we get a huge amount of calls (more than 80% of all times the emergency line rings!) that do not result in an emergency dispatch of police, fire, ambulance or other emergency responder. Most of those are wrong numbers or abandoned calls. Some can be lumped into a group I’ll call “others”.
Our area has many valid phone numbers than begin 91x. All it takes is accidentally hitting that 1 twice and we get wrong number calls. We also get a lot of these from hotels and businesses where you need to dial “9” to get an outside line. Wrong numbers are probably about 5% of our total number of emergency line calls.
And then we get many, many calls that are pocket dials, babies playing with a phone, or the caller hangs up before we can talk to them. The line rings. We answer. The line disconnects without us being able to talk to anyone. That is an abandoned call and about 70% of our total emergency line calls fall in this category!!! We call back to try to determine if there is an emergency - if we can. Some of these are from cell phones with no SIM card. For those calls we do not see a call back number.
The “others” category can be:
misuse — Caller asks “What time is it?” or “What is the phone number for [private business]”
not knowing who else to call — Caller says there is a dead cat on the road and he didn’t know who else to call.
non-emergency police matters — reporting loud music from a party.
The “others” category probably accounts for another 5% of our total emergency line calls.
And if I am doing my math right that means “real” emergencies are only about 20% of our emergency line calls - when a caller is trying to call 9-1-1 to report a matter requiring emergency response from police, fire, or ambulance services or other emergency response agency.
You can’t delete posts, so if you notice that you’ve posted the same thing twice, try to edit the post (next to the “quote” button) and just delete all its content except a note saying “oops, double posted” or “nvm” or something like that. However, you only have a 5 minute window in which to catch this because after that you can’t edit your posts!
I’ll answer specific to our agency, and then some things a bit more general to the industry.
For our office:
Our staff process calls for police, fire, and medical call taking. We are all cross trained for call processing and dispatch. We directly dispatch police and ambulances. Our fire service handles their own dispatch (We take the call reporting a house fire and gather all the details. We inform their dispatch center of the address and nature of report. They decide exactly which fire units will respond.)
Elsewhere:
In some places the initial 9-1-1 is call answered by someone who is only trained to handle emergencies of one type (usually police) and will transfer any call for another emergency type. Their greeting when answering the call is likely to be some variation of, “9-1-1. Do you need police, fire, or ambulance?”
Emergency services is like real estate. The three most important things are location, location, and location. It is a helpless feeling to answer a call for help and know there is an emergency but not be able to determine where to send the help.
Our center does not have the ability to automatically get location information on cell phone calls. We are absolutely dependent upon the caller being able to tell us. Sometimes it can be very frustrating.
Our country only delivers postal mail to P.O. Boxes and not to the home so many people do not know their own home address. It is simply information they very rarely have ever needed. We have to be suspicious and reconfirm every address. A common issue would be that someone provides an address of #3 Major Road when in reality they live in apartment #3 at #47 Minor Rd which intersects Major Rd.
If a caller cannot tell us an address we will search various databases to make an informed guess and ask police officers to check the most likely locations. We can try to call back. We usually see the phone number and can search our database, the police records database, or the driver’s license database to see if there is a record of prior calls from that phone number. So if we hear a fight on an open line we might see a history of domestic violence calls reported from that phone number and have police check that address. Usually we can find the incident this way.
In the extreme we can make an emergency request through the phone company to at least find out which cell phone tower and which sector (angular area) the call was received from. This is a slow process but has proven useful in a few instances.
We do not use Pro QA. Our certifications are through APCO. Our guidecards are based upon their protocols, with approval of our local medical director. We are in the process of integrating APCO’s 9-1-1 Adviser software with our CAD system.
Six months. There is a continuing education program to maintain our medical dispatch qualification.
Surprisingly, yes. That is highly unusual for our industry. And we have great benefits.
In the United States I have seen openings for inexperienced operators advertised as low as about $19,000 per year. The highest I have seen was about $45,000.