State of Emergency

The Association of Public Safety Communications Officials’ Bob Smith explains the technological and human challenges facing emergency responders.

“In truth, some of the most significant challenges we're currently facing aren't technological, but human”
-Bob Smith

These are interesting times in the emergency response space. Some of the current computer aided dispatch systems are starting to add things that in the past were optional bells and whistles into their base models. We’re seeing computer aided dispatch systems that are coming standard with AVL systems with mapping and GIS components, even with some level of records management, whether it’s a typical law enforcement records management or a jail or corrections records management system.  We’re seeing more case systems now that are all encompassing. Things that have been done in the past as bits and pieces are now becoming part of the basic package. It’s a good thing because it’s more cost effective for the PSAP, but more importantly, it streamlines the operations. 

You have fewer worries about interfaces and making one system communicate with the other. One of the biggest hurdles that we’re challenging right now is interoperability when it comes to computer aided dispatch systems and data overall. We’ve had people beating the drum for radio interoperability for years, but people are just starting to realize that data interoperability is just as important as radio interoperability. If a CAD system can’t talk to a CAD system in another PSAP, then they’re potentially not as effective as they could be, so we’re seeing some CAD systems that are starting to tackle this simply by incorporating other components into a basic CAD system. 

We are making progress in this area. We’ve just had a standard published through ANSI, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) that deals with CAD systems communicating with external systems, primarily alarm monitoring companies. To put it as simply as possible, when the alarm company gets an alarm activated at a business or a residence, they can push the data out through the system into a PSAP without actually ever having to pick up the telephone and call the PSAP. On the PSAP end, it will actually display on the dispatcher’s screen as a call already input into their system, which eliminates a lot of the processing errors that could take place, such people being unfamiliar with a particular area, certain colloquialisms or how street names are pronounced.  It also speeds the process up because there’s you aren’t wasting time looking for a number, trying to dial it and calling the PSAP.

There are more standards being proposed and developed to deal with CAD systems doing the same thing. Once the technology is in place it would enable a lot a huge amount of improvements. An example would be, you are in PSAP A and you take a wireless call from someone on the interstate who actually happens to be in the next county but because of the technology of cellular telephones, the call bounced into you. Rather than taking their information and calling the other PSAP or transferring that caller, you can actually enter the data into your CAD system and push it out to the correct PSAP. It would immediately display as a call already logged into the system. 

Another example would be if you are in PSAP A and you have an incident where you need mutual aid from a neighboring PSAP, whether it’s another law enforcement agency, or another fire agency, or another ambulance. Rather than taking the time to call that other PSAP and say, “We need this fire truck or this ambulance or this many police officers to go here and this is what we’ve got going on,” they can push that data out to the other PSAP, straight into their CAD system. Again this populates the field on the dispatcher’s end as a call already in their system and then they just dispatch it, just as they would if a call taker took the call on their end. With that standard out there, other standards being developed, I think it’s just a matter of time.
 
I think we’re looking at no more than a couple of years before we achieve this because as CAD vendors improve their systems, put their new products and newer versions and additions on the market, they’ll start to incorporate these things that the public safety side at least has determined that we need. It’s a proactive approach versus reactive where we’re pushing out to them saying, “This is the kind of thing we need you guys to develop and work on,” rather than them coming to us and saying, “Here’s what we’ve built and we will sell it to you.” 

This change is really important. For years it’s always been the commercial side of the industry, the CAD vendors who have been pushing things. They had a baseline concept of what PSAP’s needed and they had historical data they’d collected and put into a system. Now the roles have shifted. There are more CAD vendors on the market now and everyone is striving to come to the top. In order to do that, they’re getting much more intimate with the PSAP’s and learning more about what we need and what we are doing. The result of that is the PSAP’s are starting to dictate what CAD systems should and shouldn’t be able to do. The roles have reversed because now we’re saying, “I need a CAD system that can do X, Y, and Z.  Yours can do X and Y but you can’t do Z, so I’m going to the next guy.” 

In truth, some of the most significant challenges we’re currently facing aren’t technological, but human. The biggest thing right now is bodies in seats. We have a tremendous staffing and retention crisis in public safety communications.  In the United States, the shortage of nurses and teachers is fairly well known.  That we don’t have enough nurses and teachers to go around is a national crisis that just about everyone’s familiar with. Ironically enough, this shortage is factoring in about 15 to 17 percent turnover rate.  By contrast, the public safety communications industry is experiencing a 19 percent turnover rate. We are in an even greater crisis, but fewer people know about it. The problem with that is that there are PSAP’s across the country and around the world training people that may not stay with them more than a year or two. A tremendous amount of time and money can be invested in this person just to see them turn around and leave. But more importantly, the greater impact is you’ll have PSAP’s that have an entire staff with less than two to three years’ experience in their position. 

There are many reasons why these staffing problems are happening. Obviously you have the typical shift work issues, working midnight shifts, weekends, holidays, being away from your family, and all of the things that come with shift work. But situation of understaffing makes these problems even worse. You have a tremendous amount of overtime because the fewer people on staff, the greater the need for overtime. You have people that working a tremendous amount of overtime to compensate for the fact that they are so shorthanded, so it’s a pretty vicious cycle. Everyone is short staffed so the people they do have start to burn out faster.  And then they leave.

There’s also the inherent nature of the job, There is a huge amount of stress that comes with dealing with people for up to 12 hours a day, who are in life or death situations and knowing that a single number key pushed wrong or one simple word misstated on the radio could potentially be an error that could cost someone their life.  There’s a high amount of stress involved in that, and there’s stress just from answering the phone.  Nobody ever calls 911 because they’re having a good day.

There are also issues with the industry overall. Public safety communications personnel are typically very low paid.  The salaries are not commensurate with the workload.  They are not very well respected in the public safety industry because for years the telecommunicators were simply secretaries, answering the phone, taking messages and passing it on. 

We’re starting to overcome that prejudice with certain levels of certifications and standards and professionalism within the industry, but there’s still a hint of that around, Beyond that, 911, 999, 112, wherever you are in the world, the problem behind it is that the public safety communications component of public safety is transparent to the end user. We don’t have the big red fire trucks and the flashing blue lights. We don’t have the medical bags and the kits.  You never see us.  You talk to us, but the people that actually come out help you are the people you identify with.  We’re completely transparent, so there’s obviously a public education campaign there as well.  All of that factors into a high turnover rate, the inability to get those highly effective people and to keep those people once you’ve got them.

There are a few things that we can do to improve the situation. The easiest is just raising salary levels, but that’s not always feasible, especially in the current economic climate, but there are a lot of things that are much simpler and some that are relatively cost effective and some that are even free. For example, little things like employee recognition.  Every year in April, we run National Public Safety Telecommunications Week. This event is recognized by most states and has received presidential and congressional declarations. It’s just about taking time to appreciate public safety telecommunicators.  As well as making people in the job feel respected, it publicizes that there this entire industry of highly dedicated, professional public safety communications personnel who are there day in, day out, to protect you whether you’re calling them with an emergency or you’re a police officer making a traffic stop. Things like that cost next to nothing but they can have a big impact on morale.

Beyond that, it’s reaching out and explaining to people exactly what the 911 telecommunicator does so that it becomes a more attractive career option. You would be hard pressed to find a kid anywhere in the country that says, “When I grow up I want to be a 911 dispatcher.” Educating them to what we do and how we do it is really important. Then we get more qualified candidates applying for these positions so that we can rely on them to make it through training, become an effective part of the staff and ultimately stay with us for a decent amount of time.

About a year ago, APCO International partnered with IJIS Institute, which is a nonprofit organization for commercial information technology corporations. We received a grant from the Department of Justice and launched something called the Public Safety Data Interoperability Initiative. The concept is to bring the commercial providers together with the public safety professionals. This allows them to be more proactive so that, as they’re developing the systems of tomorrow, they’re incorporating our needs.

It’s a large project and we’ve put out 11 standards already that deal with data interoperability between basic CAD systems, records management systems, databases and GIS systems.  Everything data interoperability-wise is being looked at by this project. It includes public safety personnel, fire service personnel, EMS, law enforcement personnel. We brought everybody that could be potentially affected by data interoperability together. The IJIS Institute brings the value of having the Microsoft’s, the Cisco’s, the Sun Microsystem’s and all the big IT providers out there to the table with them as part of their membership. We bring the public safety side of things to the table with our membership. 

We’ve been in it for almost two years now, so we’re starting to see the results of some of the work being done by this group. The CAD vendors are opening their arms and embracing a lot of these standards that we’re developing, so it may even speed up the process of having a higher level of data interoperability on the public safety side.