When a 5-year-old called 911 Sunday to order a Happy Meal, a Mesa police officer came to his rescue.
The 5-year-old child, identified by the Mesa Police Department only as Charlie because he’s a minor, dialed 911 Sunday and asked the dispatcher if he was calling McDonald’s, according to a copy of the 911 calls provided to The Arizona Republic Wednesday.
When asked by the dispatcher, Anthony Bonilla… READ MORE
As part of a series created for BBC Bitesize, North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) Dispatcher Emily Blezard has been speaking about her role to inspire young people thinking about their careers.
As a dispatcher, 23-year-old Emily is responsible for around 20 ambulances in and around central Manchester, making tough decisions to ensure that ambulances are quickly sent to those patients most in need of help.
She is the main point of contact between the ambulance crew and control room which means that communication and multi-tasking are crucial skills.
Emily says: “I did languages at school which I think has really helped me as a dispatcher as it gave me practice to communicate under pressure, think on my feet and be able to give an answer when there’s an unexpected question.”
Inspired by her mum and dad – both of whom also work for NWAS – Emily decided to follow suit and begin her career helping those in their time of need.
MANDAN, ND – Sunday’s fire in Mandan sparked a chain reaction from first responders.
In all the commotion, the heroes coordinating the help behind the scenes are rarely thought of.
Chantel Hartl, a dispatcher for Central Dakota Communications, took the initial call about the fire at the Sunset Bluffs apartments.
From there, she sent the fire fighters, ambulance, law enforcement, backup, and utilities to the scene.
“I don’t want to say that it’s stressful. There is a high volume of activity initially. Probably, within the first 15 to 20 minutes we had 20 911 calls in that particular incident as well as because we work dispatch for other agencies. That stuff coming into our center as well,” Hartl explains.
Heidi DiGennaro
When you started, everything was overwhelming. There was fear or excitement in touching the equipment, the constant dread you might break something, and the encouragement to go ahead from your trainer. Training seemed to take so long, and there was something both terrifying and liberating about operating on your own. Now you have a few months, years, maybe a decade or two (gulp!) of experience and everything has changed and some parts remain the same.
Technology moved forward, and in some cases, outpaced our ability to keep up with it. Forward momentum with technology has created challenges and caused us to adapt to keep up. The work—talking to the public and the field providers and ranting at the console when your foot comes off the pedal—has stayed the same. So why train and why train constantly?
Policies and procedures
If you do not have a strong foundation of what to do, policies are meaningless. They are words on a paper or screen if you do not find a way to apply them. It’s not the time to look up an active assailant procedure during an active assailant incident. The same goes for an MCI when heat exposure or a multi-vehicle accident occurs. It’s not good management to quarterback people about how they handled an incident and remind them about the policy they haven’t looked at since it went into effect.
Build confidence
Spend five minutes reading a policy or highlighting a procedure on the off chance you might need it. Mortar the gaps and cracks in your knowledge to create a stable base to lean on when the worst happens. Supervisors need to lead and to lead by example, knowing your procedures and policies. Use any roll call time to go over something, anything, every day.
Public safety
You never know what will happen, and refreshing yourself makes you smart and promotable, if that’s your intent. Training classes teach you what the agency/department does, and it saves you the embarrassment of fumbling for words when someone asks about a certain policy and whether you even have one. Knowing policies and following them during crisis is your best defense when someone outside your organization starts tearing apart your actions.
Liability
When you follow policy, your agency should defend your actions.
I’ve seen a few things in my 24-year public safety career, from police dispatcher, to calltaker, to backup fire dispatcher, to supervisor, to shift manager, with several other specialties in between. I have met people who know the policies, know exactly what to do, and how to do it when the equation Chaos + Oscillation Device + the Smelly Spread presents itself. Training saw me through the worst incidents. I use our roll call time to review, to train, and to amuse.
It’s simple—start now
Pick something to go over and search the internet for an image that matches your training topic. Word of caution: Tell your supervisors so they know your internet history will be a little “interesting.” Make learning humorous—there is always a “fail” out there on any topic. One minute, five minutes, 20 minutes—the time is never wasted. Even if one person remembers what you went over during a critical moment, everyone succeeds. An incident does not turn into a cluster. Someone survives because you and your people knew what to do.
That’s why we train.
Charlotte Gentry
I am going to tell my story about that day, the Oct. 1 Shooting, even though in my eyes, that’s not the official name. I can’t bring myself to call it that. I am going to be raw, honest, and open because I think that is what people should hear. It may not be what you want to hear, but it’s what I need for you to know.
I went back to work on Oct. 3 because there were people at my job that would need my help. I was on the peer support team. I was OK. I never cried in those first few months. I didn’t have survivor’s guilt. I joined survivors’ pages and watched people talk about how they couldn’t leave their house. They couldn’t function and were sad all the time.
That wasn’t me (or so I thought). I shared my story more times than I can recall and every time it got easier. I didn’t have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It felt like it didn’t hit me as hard as I saw it affecting other people. I immediately started going back to concerts and back to my life. I kept busy for months trying to do things for my agency, so they got the recognition that they deserved. I was OK … but I wasn’t. I was just ignoring it. I was ignoring the anxiety, the emptiness I felt inside, and the depression. I would sleep as much as I could. I lost focus at work. I made HUGE mistakes, and hurt people trying to fill that void inside me.
When the shooting started, I was alone. And that is how I felt for almost the whole last year. People at work would tell me they were worried about me because I was different. I didn’t feel any different, but I heard this from multiple people. I lost my smile. I lost my happiness and never noticed. I was always anxious at work. There were so many days that I cried at work and times I just sat and looked at my computer screen. It is hard for people that weren’t there to know how I was feeling and it’s not something you can explain, so I tried to deal with it myself. I went to a trauma counselor and that didn’t really help. I found another counselor that was OK, but I didn’t feel like she was helping so I quit going.
My therapy became getting tattoos. I got six since the shooting and I’m going today to get another one. The pain of the tattoos helped me feel… something, even though it was pain. It took the pain that I didn’t know I had and made it go away for those few hours. Every time I felt anxious, I called my tattoo artist. I now have almost a full sleeve.
I took a lot of Valium during this time. Enough that it would knock most people out. But it didn’t stop the anxiousness and I didn’t tell anyone.
In this business you don’t let things get to you, right? Wrong; they get to us slowly over time and we never admit it. This is what I am doing. I am admitting that I was not OK, and it took me a long time to get there (11 and a half months to be exact). I never thought about hurting myself, but there were so many days that I wished I just didn’t exist. There are some amazing people that I work with, but just like any other center there are those ones that make work hell. They made my last year harder than it had to be.
Being shot at and involved in the worst mass shooting in America’s history wasn’t enough. I had issues at work and outside of work, but I always blamed it on something else. I was diagnosed with PTSD, surprise! I wasn’t OK. Like I mentioned earlier I made some huge mistakes; I hurt people and all I can do is say I am sorry. I can’t go back and change anything. My career isn’t the same. I made mistakes and I felt like the first job I ever loved, some of the coworkers that liked me (not all), abandoned me when I needed them the most. But you live and you learn, and these lessons that all this horrible stuff has taught me will always stay with me.
In the last few months I have started to come out of my depression for the most part. I rarely take Valium. I have started the journey to happiness. There were a couple of times during the last few months when what I had gone through and how much it changed me slapped me in the face. I was standing in the kitchen talking to my 81-year-old mom and she got teary eyed. I asked her what was wrong and she said to me, “I finally have my daughter back. I lost her for the last year.”
I didn’t see it, but now I know and I’ve started changing. I started working out, eating better, and I met my husband. We got married after knowing each other for six weeks. It wasn’t because I needed to have someone around; it’s because we just clicked. We knew from the first few dates that it was right.
They say the one-year anniversary of a traumatic event can be the hardest, and the week leading up to it was hard, but it was healing. I tried to do too many events to help heal. The night of Oct. 1, 2018, survivors made a human chain around the Route 91 venue. It felt like we had to be there at that exact time that the shooting started for the 58 people that lost their lives. We all lost a piece of us that we will never get back. Trauma changes people and you can never go back to who you were before that day. We have a new normal and the new normal isn’t so bad. That night at the human chain, I didn’t feel the closure I thought I would feel, although the hugs from other survivors were amazing. We knew how each other felt.
I visited the Healing Garden on Sept. 30, and looking at the wall with the 58 names on it brought tears to my eyes. My son and mom could have been there looking at my name. I am so glad they didn’t have to go through that. I felt the closure on Sept. 20, 2018, when I got to finish what we started at Route 91 and I got to see Jason Aldean perform. There were about 200 survivors at that concert and it felt right being around people that had been through the same thing I had. When he sang the two songs that he was singing when the shooting happened, I finally let myself cry. That is when I felt the closure. I was a member of a club I never signed up for, but I love my CountryStrong and LoveWins club. I am not OK. And it’s OK to not be OK … but I will be.
Charlotte Gentry Munro is the Quality Improvement Coordinator for Las Vegas Fire and Rescue communications. She is also a Priority Dispatch Software Instructor and a National Q. She was attending the Route 91 Harvest Music festival on Oct. 1, 2017, when a gunman opened fire on the crowd, killing 58 people and injuring hundreds more.
Kristin K. Brooks
Speed bumps. I don’t know about you, but when I hear that word, I automatically get annoyed. Speed bumps are those annoying little things that always appear to slow me down. I know that speed bumps are placed where they are for good reasons—to slow the speed of cars in a residential area, for example—but it doesn’t mean I have to like them.
In the communication center, I sometimes feel like I am driving down a highway of speed bumps. I feel like I am on top of my game when a speed bump appears and slows me down.
There are even different kinds of speed bumps. I remember as a little girl riding my bicycle over speed bumps that made me bounce. These were the tall and skinny ones. I was impatient with my dad driving over these inconvenient spots in the roadway. Couldn’t he go around them? In my grandmother’s neighborhood, speed bumps are the vehicle’s full length. They are called speed tables. The speed bump is so wide that you laugh—how is this supposed to slow me down? I never slow down and end up looking like an episode of “The Dukes of Hazzard” with my vehicle flying through the air and landing nose first on the other side.
Then there are speed bumps that sneak up on me. I saw the warning sign but got distracted and don’t hit the brakes fast enough, and I end up bracing for impact. In the aftermath, I tell myself not to let that happen again. There are also speed bumps in the communication center. They are inconvenient incidents that happen in intervals that slow us down. No one really likes a speed bump, but once you hit one, you stop and consider why the speed bump is there. Speed bumps in the communication center can help us slow down, step back, and regroup.
The tall, skinny ones are incidents or problems that sort of come and go. Nothing too damaging, but a situation that stirs everyone to take a step back and regroup. Take, for example, when the CAD gives similar street names to pick from and you unknowingly pick the wrong address. First responders go to the wrong address, the caller wonders when help will arrive, and the dispatcher is frustrated over the preventable mistake. The incident is not life-threatening [although it could be], but it reminds everyone about what could happen in a more serious event.
The speed table incidents are the ones that no one wants to go through. The media are a prime example. Sometimes they camp out near the department as a constant reminder of a mishap. They play up the event and the not always accurate facts run throughout the day on the communication center TV. These situations unhinge or unravel the comfort zone. These incidents can force some emergency dispatchers to question their passion. Is it worth holding on tight and going through the storm?
The speed bumps that come with warning signs that are ignored or forgotten are incidents that you truly never saw coming, although the signs were all there. The death of a co-worker brings sadness. If the person was ill, the warning signs were probably there, but everyone ignored them because it’s easier than accepting reality. The department regroups from the incident and tries to move forward.
Speed bumps in the comm. center are inevitable. These inconvenient incidents remind us why we chose this profession. It is easy to get complacent, and we shouldn’t. We need to develop ways to approach these speed bumps. We should look at them as learning experiences so that in the future we remember to double-check an address, remember that we know what happened during an event, and remember not to take co-workers for granted. Together, we can learn to go over these speed bumps with grace.
