I’ve been thinking about when 911 was implemented in my city. It was the early eighties here.
https://www.nena.org/?page=911overviewfacts
I’ve always thought the stress would be overwhelming. Every call is an emergency. They often talk to victims until emergency personnel arrive. They get requests like, tell my wife I love her.
Do the operators have a way to find out the outcome of a call? In very general terms?
Like…
Did this guy make it to the hospital alive? Did he recover?
It varies from call center to call center so this is really more of an IMHO question, but generally our center does not know the outcome for medical calls beyond whether the ambulance delivers the patient to the hospital still breathing. For fire calls the fire department will usually advise when the fire is under control and when it is considered out. And for police calls we are usually informed if an arrest is made, though we get no follow through on whether a person is prosecuted unless we see it in the news just like anyone else.
In more detail… we can hear what the ambulance tells the hospital via radio for most patient transports. That would include whether CPR is still underway. And many times, though not all, the hospital will call to report a sudden death if the patient does not survive. Rarely does a patient survive when they arrive at the hospital with CPR still in progress. But a couple years ago we were pleasantly surprised to find out one such CPR call resulted in the patient surviving. We found out in a news report about a month after the fact.* A colleague took that call and I dispatched it.
But for other medical calls, generally we don’t know the outcome. Caller reports a patient unconscious and the circumstances. We dispatch the ambulance. And once the transport to the hospital is complete we rarely find out exactly what the medical issue was. Seizure? Diabetic problem? Stroke? Or something else? A LOT of things can cause a loss of consciousness. Same goes more most other types of medical calls.
For fire calls we are more likely to see a news report if a home is burned to the ground. Otherwise we can generally presume that a fire that takes longer and requires more backup has probably done more damage.
And for police calls, it is all over the place. We previously had officers call our center and provide details for every report they were dispatched to so we could enter the preliminary report in the police database, but that has not happened for a few years. Now we do generally hear about arrests, or if a report (say a burglar alarm) was found to be unsubstantiated (no break in found).
*Not every CPR save makes the news. There is no sweeter sound then hearing a child patient start to cry after CPR was successfully administered. But even such seemingly good stories do not generally make the news. While we don’t have HIPAA here (outside of USA), most straight medical calls are considered a private medical matter and not newsworthy, even if police were sent to evaluate the situation. Usually press releases come from the polcie department.
I’m not cut out for that kind of stressful work. I’m glad there are people out there that answer 911 and handle the call professionally and send help.
As an aside, CPR doesn’t work like it does in the movies. In the movies, someone is in bad condition, then the hero does CPR for a few minutes, and then the victim is fixed and gets up. In reality, though, CPR doesn’t fix anything. It just keeps things from getting worse, for as long as you keep doing it. Or more realistically, it slows down the rate at which things get worse. You have to keep doing CPR continually, until you’re able to do something that actually will help. It used to be that this meant, at least, the arrival of the paramedics (who have a defibrillator and know how to use it), but nowadays there are automatic emergency defibrillators all over the place, easy enough to be used by a layman.
Lots of people aren’t, the washout rate is pretty high.
As far as I can tell, though, it’s not necessarily the stress of the calls that people can’t handle. It’s having to keep track of everything that’s going on and prioritizing and responding to multiple situations at once.
And unfortunately many 911/dispatch centers can’t afford to pay. So rural centers will be staffed with people who are making $10/hr.
If only that were true!
From friends who have worked at 911 calls, one of their annoying problems is people who call 911 for trivial things. Everything from “the drive-thru messed up my order” to “my toddler refuses to go to bed” to “my husband has been drinking and is yelling at me” and so forth. The 911 operators have to deal with all this, and sort through and decode which ones are ‘real’ emergencies, and prioritize the response.
Real high-pressure, and intense consequences if they make the wrong decision – publicity in all the news media, possible job loss, even possible legal charges.
Anecdotal stories abound in the industry about wash out rate. The two stats I have heard alleged a lot are that only about 2% of the population as a whole have what it takes to do the job. And of those who think they want to do it and go through the classroom training only about 25% are successful with typical training programs.
And I have seen 911 job listings that pay less than a fast food job. Many people with the skills, temperament, and desire to work in the 911 field are unable to continue doing so for financial reasons.
I see a current 911 job listing asking:
. The ad, in part, reads:
Federal minimum wage is US$7.25/hr. At full time that works out to about $15,080 so this listing is for less than full time minimum wage. :eek:
We don’t have a separate call center or use a county call center. Our dispatchers are in our building. If Tony or Donna or whoever wants to know what happened they can pull up the report, call me on my cell, or just wait until I stop in with their coffee.
As an example, we get dozens of hang up calls, pocket or butt dials, etc… every day. But there is that <1% tiny chance that it is a person seriously in distress and unable to speak. So you have to listen to those carefully for any sign that this is not just a baby playing with a phone or something similar. I have had two such silent calls* in 11+ years that were determined to be dire true emergencies.
And then there are silly non-emergency calls every bit as trivial as t-bonham@scc.net described. The caller may think that being served cold chicken nuggets is an emergency, but the police have a different idea about that.
And then there is the contrast. You go from an OMG true emergency crisis to something trivial. Dollars to donuts that it will be that trivial caller who will call back in 2 minutes complaining that the police have not yet arrived and tell you how they know people and will have your job for the slow response to their incident.
Never know what the next call will bring. Ever tried to negotiate with a hostage taker who has already shot and killed someone just minutes before?
*One was a stroke patient, unable to speak. Other was a kidnap victim calling from the trunk of her kidnapper’s car.
Good officers bring coffee. 
They know the value of a good dispatcher.
I don’t know. I would guess that the answer is often no, unless the dispatcher makes a point of talking to the people involved. For a medical thing, the dispatcher knows which ambulance was sent, for example, and is probably part of the circle of care to receive some “private” information in good conscience.
And sometimes bagels.
I can empathize to a certain extent. I put in thousands of hours working on a crisis line. We would get lovely things like men calling to report a rape in progress, just so they could get their jollies while describing what they were “hearing”. My most memorable calls on the other end of the spectrum involved an teen who was being abused by her father and was afraid he would kill her, and a suicidal mother of a young infant (the father was her rapist). I was always fine in the moment, but those are the two that stick with me all these years later.
To the OP, although a crisis center is different from a 911 center, we were often the first place called. Unless we assigned an advocate to follow a specific person through a court proceeding, we never learned outcomes.
Many years ago, I had a pen pal who worked in 911 dispatch for a while. One of the main reasons the job is hard to fill, and it’s hard to keep employees, is usually because everyone starts on nights, and only goes to a day/evening rotation whenever those people leave.
She loved the job but quit because of a conflict with a co-worker. She also said that during the time she worked there, which wasn’t all that long, there were only two calls that to her were really upsetting.