Wilson County Emergency Communications earned accreditation through the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch as an Emergency Medical/Fire Dispatch Center of Excellence.
Wilson County 911 is now the 365th emergency medical and 84th first dispatch accredited center in the world, according to Wilson County Communications Director Stephen Mann.
Back in 2015, during one of the early FirstNet hearings on Capitol Hill, the Chair of FirstNet, Sue Swenson, briefed our nation’s elected officials on FirstNet, its progress, and the direction it was heading. With the confidence of a seasoned corporate telecommunications executive, she spoke about the many successes and how the network was going to get built. At one point, she was asked if they were going to reach their 2022 deployment goal. In her ever-present calm demeanor, she looked up at the dais and said, “Yes. If we don’t, I mean, we should be shot,” which clearly caused an awkward pause (and laughter), as the straightforward answer surprised many who were used to hedged responses like, “I think we can,” or “we will do our best.” Well, history has shown that she and the FirstNet Board got it done and indeed met all their 2022 goals.
Mission Critical Push-to-Talk (MCPTT) is an international 3GPP standard that allows public safety agencies to use broadband cellular networks (4G/LTE and 5G) with the same one-button Push-to-Talk feature as their traditional Land Mobile Radios (LMR).
In plain English, MCPTT makes a smartphone as quick and easy to use as a one-button PTT LMR handset. What makes MCPTT so different is that it uses the high-speed data capacity of cellular networks to enable live video streaming, file sharing, and real-time location tracking, capabilities that traditional voice-only radio systems simply cannot match.
The East Bridgewater, Massachusetts police and fire departments are giving thanks to a Holbrook dispatcher who they say helped save a 4-year-old girl’s life Monday night.
While working at the Holbrook Regional Emergency Communications Center at 5:32 p.m., authorities say Sophia Zervos answered a 911 call from two parents at a West Street home in East Bridgewater, reporting their daughter stopped breathing.
These data sources can come from 911 calls, Internet of Things technology, and other software systems used by first responders.
“All of that connects to the CAD. And with the legacy CAD system we had that wasn’t necessarily [the case],” Saur said. “There was some legacy connections. But as technology changes rapidly, they’re looking for interfaces that a cloud connection can easily do.”
I’m writing this as a local fire chief in mid-Missouri and representing NAEMT on the Public Safety Advisory Committee to the FirstNet Authority. Those two roles are not separate. What happens in Washington DC, directly affects what happens in a patient’s living room, in the cab of a fire engine, or in the middle of a multi-agency incident where nothing is clean and nothing is predictable.
