By Anna Johnson
The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.)
RALEIGH, N.C. — City of Raleigh employees seeking promotions will need to be vaccinated against COVID-19, according to a recent city memo.
The city’s 4,000 employees must be vaccinated by Friday or start weekly testing. If testing is refused, the employee will face “progressive discipline,” according to an email to employees sent in mid-August.
Now the city plans to limit promotions to those vaccinated, according to a memo sent last week to the Raleigh Police Department.
“The decision requiring promoted employees to be vaccinated was recently made by city leadership and applies to the entire organization,” said Sherry Hunter, the police department’s administrative services division commander…
In the aftermath of the recent storms that dumped heavy rain on western North Carolina, a Telecommunicator Emergency Response Taskforce (TERT) was deployed to support the Haywood County Communications Center, in providing some relief for the telecommunicators there who worked through the storm and aftermath with little time for rest or relief. In addition to being an Emergency Management watch analyst with the N.C. Department of Public Safety’s Division of Emergency Management 24-Hour Watch, Marianne Nicolaysen is Emergency Medical Dispatch (EMD) certified and gladly took up the challenge of being on the taskforce.
While working as part of the TERT, Nicolaysen received administrative and 911 calls, including from a distraught woman who advised that the caller’s mother, approximately 50 years old, was acting strangely and having difficulty breathing; they were at a rest stop on Interstate 40 and the situation was deteriorating. To make matters more difficult a toddler was in the car. As Nicolaysen began to attempt a breathing diagnostic on the mother, which is a way to count the rate of respirations to determine if someone is breathing effectively, it became obvious that she was no longer breathing at all. Following the protocol for a subject in cardiac arrest she began giving instructions for the caller, who she estimated to be in her 20s, to start CPR while routing the call to a dispatcher… READ MORE
WEARE TWP. — A trial period of how medical responses are dispatched came to a close after a vote was taken during a regular meeting Wednesday morning of the Mason-Oceana 911 Board at the dispatch center.
The 90-day trial period involved having medical calls into Mason-Oceana 911 conferenced into Life EMS’s dispatch center in Grand Rapids. Life EMS dispatchers would set the call’s priority — from one to three, with one being the most severe.
Previously, Mason-Oceana 911 would set the priority…
PORTLAND, Ore. — Portland’s Community Safety Director said city leaders have failed to manage a series of public safety crises and said the mismanagement has led the city to where it is on a range of problems like police call volume, gun violence, and 911 wait times.
The comment came up in a meeting Thursday that was mostly focused on the dire situation inside Portland’s dispatch center, where wait times are as long as four or five minutes for people calling 911 in Multnomah County…
MONTPELIER — The Department of Public Safety has pulled the plug — at least temporarily — on a new computer assisted dispatch and records system for Vermont State Police and many local and county police agencies across the state.
The move came after department Commissioner Michael Schirling struggled Tuesday afternoon to explain the apparent meltdown that the system, known as Valcour, had earlier this week when it was rolled out to about two-dozen law enforcement agencies.
The rollout group included the 10 state police field offices, Department of Public Safety headquarters, and the entire Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department. The affected municipal agencies were spread throughout Vermont and ranged from the 17-member Williston Police down to the part-time police departments in Canaan and Brighton. Also affected were some active sheriff’s departments, including in Grand Isle and Essex counties…
Health One, a Seattle Fire Department program that responds to low-acuity crisis calls, is a relatively new alternative for 911 dispatchers.
By Paul Kiefer
The last time Seattle launched a new department—Seattle Information Technology, which brought IT staff from across the city under one roof—the consolidation took years. “In contrast, we had about eight months,” said Chris Lombard, who leads the city’s newest department: the Community Safety and Communications Center (CSCC), which began work at the beginning of June.
In some ways, creating the CSCC involved fewer moving parts than the infamously messy set-up of the massive citywide IT department. When plans to move the parking enforcement unit to the CSCC fell through this spring, Lombard was left overseeing a single, crucial, service: Seattle’s 911 call center. The center, historically a civilian unit inside the Seattle Police Department, will play a key role in the city’s efforts to shift away from a police-centric approach to public safety, and the city’s decision to house the 911 call center in the department was one of the first concrete steps in that effort…
Learn about current efforts to continue to protect the 4.9 GHz Band for public safety as well as recent filings, key decisions impacting these efforts, and how you can support PSSA’s initiative to protect the 4.9 GHz band for public safety.
