Necessity indeed is the mother of invention

An adage regarding the stock market goes something like this: over any 20-year period, the market delivers a return on investment of about 10 percent, but every 20-year period—regardless of when it begins or when it ends—contains peaks and valleys that are driven by market conditions that change often, and often substantially.

This adage just as easily could be applied to 911 call volume, according to Brian Fontes, chief executive officer of the National Emergency Number Association (NENA), which estimates that 240 million emergency calls are made to the 911 system each year—an average of 657,534 per day. Fontes said that the COVID-19 pandemic provides a good example of the ebb and flow.

“Anecdotally, fewer 911 calls were made resulting from car crashes, because many people were working from home or had lost their jobs, so there were less cars on the roads,” Fontes said. “On the other hand, this was offset by an increase in domestic-violence calls stemming from the fact that people were confined in close quarters with others for long periods of time.”

Call volume also fluctuates significantly based on where emergency communications centers (ECCs)—also known as public-safety answering points (PSAPs)—are located.

“911 always has been a local issue,” said Brian Tegtmeyer, coordinator of the National 911 Program, which is housed within the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA). “If your center is located in a college town, for instance, your Thursday night is going to look a lot different than another center’s that isn’t in a college town.”

Tegtmeyer, who previously was director of DuPage Public Safety Communications (DU-COMM)—a large ECC that serves Chicago’s western suburbs—agrees that 911 call volume is holding steady overall with short-term fluctuations driven by local conditions. Statistics contained in DU-COMM’s 2021 annual report support this notion. Between 2018 and 2021, 911 call volume increased an inconsequential 2.5%; however, between 2019 and 2020, call volume decreased by 10.4% but then increased by 12.6% between 2020 and 2021.

So, 911 call volume nationwide is holding steady, and that’s a huge problem in the current environment, which is being impacted greatly by staffing shortages at ECCs from coast to coast. The big conundrum? How to handle emergency calls in alignment with industry standards when there are far fewer telecommunicators available to do so.

“The irony is that ECCs are getting more efficient, but staffing shortages are getting in the way of that,” said Jackie Mines, a Mission Critical Partners senior communications consultant.

Mines is supporting the National 911 Program on several initiatives, including assessments of the current status of geographic information systems (GIS) and computer-aided-dispatch system interoperability, as well as a pilot project that is testing strategies and tactics for achieving data integration across the public-safety ecosystem.

It’s time to get creative

ECCs have been feeling the profound effects of a severe staffing shortage for several years. When telecommunicator seats are empty, it becomes much more challenging to keep pace with 911 call volume, especially in busy centers. Telecommunicators often must work longer shifts and a considerable amounts of overtime to pick up the slack. Further, they often cannot take time off when they want or need to do so. This makes an incredibly stressful job even more stressful.

Numerous factors are contributing to what amounts to a “perfect storm” of staffing challenges. They include funding shortfalls, a lack of recognition for telecommunicators, the aforementioned incredibly stressful work environment, the negative impacts of social media, old-school recruiting and hiring practices, and a large number of retirements driven by the “Silver Tsunami”—i.e., baby boomers who are leaving the workforce in droves and will continue to do so for several more years.

As a result, the concept of alternative response is gaining traction within the 911 community. It involves leaning on other entities to process and respond to various non-emergency situations. This might take the form of redirecting calls to other municipal/county entities before they come into the ECC, or to 211, 311, 511, or other 10-digit non-emergency lines that might be more appropriate for a particular circumstance.

The fly in the ointment is that such lines do not exist in many areas, and even when they do, the public often isn’t aware of them. In the latter instance, an aggressive campaign to educate the public on when it is appropriate to dial 911—and what to do when it is not—is imperative, according to Jim Lake, director of Charleston County (South Carolina) Public Safety’s Consolidated 911 Center Department. The department has placed a sign on the outfield fence at the county’s minor-league ballpark and has created a series of animated icons and short videos that provide such education, while also offering tips for avoiding emergencies in the first place, which theoretically will reduce the number of 911 calls. One is tied to Shark Week, which makes a lot of sense given that the county is situated on the Atlantic coast and attracts a lot of tourists in the spring and summer.

Distributed via social media, the animation and videos also are used to attract potential new hires, which is a critical need given that the center has 46 telecommunicator positions to fill. “We wanted to do something fun that would attract people,” Lake said, adding that the word also is spread via numerous interactions with neighborhood groups.

The department also had to address a spate of non-emergency calls that were coming into the center during the work week from an unusual source.

“We encourage our people to be so customer-friendly and so customer-oriented that we sometimes lose track of all the things that they’re doing in the 911 center,” Lake said. “So, we sat down with staff and did a workload assessment.”

The assessment revealed that numerous calls were being generated by traffic reporters.

“During rush hour, which is our busiest time, they were calling us, and our telecommunicators were going through our CAD incidents to tell them where there were crashes—and they were doing this several times during those rush hours, which was tying up staff,” Lake said.

To end this practice, the department created a tool that pushes accident data generated by its CAD system to traffic reporters in real time, thus eliminating the need for the reporters to call the 911 center to get that information.

Meanwhile, it is far too early to gauge the impact that 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, will have on 911 call volume—the lifeline launched on Aug. 6. The predecessor to 988—the National Suicide Prevention Hotline—was reached by dialing a 10-digit number that will remain operational. The conventional thinking is that calls previously made to 911 because people couldn’t remember the 10-digit number—a common occurrence when someone is experiencing a suicide, mental-health, or substance-abuse crisis—now will go to 988, which should ease the burden experienced by telecommunicators somewhat.

But sometimes 911 calls simply cannot be avoided. Recognizing that, Grand Junction (Colorado) Regional Communication Center is giving its telecommunicators more latitude in determining which calls actually require an emergency response, with the goal of reducing the number of times that law enforcement, fire/rescue, and emergency medical personnel and apparatus are dispatched to non-emergency incidents.

“These calls usually involve mental-health incidents or wellness checks,” said Jennifer Kirkland, 911 center manager. “For example, when someone is found sleeping on a park bench in the overnight hours. Telecommunicators can evaluate, based on the information given them, whether to specifically dispatch an officer or to handle it a different way that doesn’t involve dispatching an officer.”

Keeping personnel is as important as finding them

If a 911 center has the right number of people in the right seats, it will function at a high level. But if it doesn’t, it will struggle to handle emergency calls and dispatch the appropriate response in alignment with industry standards, best practices, and community needs. But the factors identified previously in this article that are driving the current staffing crisis are making recruitment, hiring, and retention far more challenging. Consequently, both Lake and Kirkland have gotten creative in their approach to solving this riddle.

In Charleston, telecommunicators now are being hired to work an 8-hour shift instead of the traditional 12-hour shift and are taking advantage of very flexible schedules.

“We’re trying to provide a workplace that is friendlier to the workforce,” Lake said. “In the past, we always were pretty rigid in how we do things. Now, for the most part, they tell us when they want to work. I know what the hours are that I need to cover, and as long as I’m covering those hours, it doesn’t matter how.”

Lake also has started to conduct “stay” interviews, which arguably are even more important than the traditional exit interviews.

“If we can discover why someone is staying, then we can build on that,” Lake said.

In Colorado, Kirkland has changed how overtime is administered.

“We haven’t had to make overtime mandatory, because almost everyone signs up for it,” she said. “The problem was that some people were more generous than others with their time and were signing up for a disproportionate amount—and we were burning them out.”

Now the center requires that each telecommunicator signs up for an equal amount of overtime hours each week.

“They can choose when to serve their overtime, but we all need to carry the load evenly,” Kirkland said. “It’s a low number of hours, but when they’re spread evenly, no one gets burned out.”

The center also is widening its net considerably as it searches for new personnel.

“We’re doing a lot of ‘position mining’ on LinkedIn and Indeed,” Kirkland said. “We’re searching for keywords such as ‘bartender,’ and ‘server,’ and ‘barista,’ people who will be successful telecommunicators because they are good with people and at multitasking. We also look for people who want to leave nursing because they are used to shift work.”

In Alexandria, Virginia, the Department of Emergency Communications (DEC) also is embracing flexibility by allowing all telecommunicators to work from home. The practice started out of necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic, when telecommunicators were unable to get to the facility either because they became ill and were quarantined or were under shelter-in-place orders.

Many centers across the country followed this practice—something that would have been unthinkable before the pandemic—but reverted to normal operations as the pandemic loosened its grip. But the DEC decided to keep it in place as a way of dealing with a hyper-competitive job market.

“The workforce is changing, and we have to open our eyes to that,” said Renee Gordon, DEC’s director. “This is a vital job, and we need to have the right people and the right number of people. So, how do we get them and keep them? We thought letting them work from home was a big part of the answer.”

To support the initiative, telecommunicators were issued laptops loaded with all of the applications they need to do their jobs. The also received a portable uninterruptible power supply to back up the commercial power to their homes. In a bit of good fortune, the department already was a subscriber on the FirstNet nationwide public-safety broadband network, so every telecommunicator was able to get the high-bandwidth connectivity they needed by tapping into network hotspots.

“Frankly, I don’t know whether we would have done this without FirstNet,” Gordon said. “We needed something that was reliable and public-safety grade.”

The initiative has spawned a couple of additional benefits. “Because they’re working from home, they’re more willing to pick up overtime,” Gordon said. “Plus, if anything major happens, they’re ready to go to work right away—they don’t have to spend a half hour or more driving to the 911 center.”

Glenn Bischoff is a content specialist for Mission Critical Partners (www.MissionCriticalPartners.com), which provides consulting and managed services to public-sector organizations. Prior to joining MCP, he was editor-in-chief of IWCE’s Urgent Communications for a decade.