They not only have to remain calm in the face of sometimes heart-rending events, they also must try to calm the victims in an emergency.
And they often have to see to it that multiple tasks are being completed in a hurry while they’re doing all that.
It takes a special kind of person to keep doing that day after day, but there are several employees at the county who have been working in that environment since the centralized 911 system started 10 years ago.
“It’s stressful, because we’re the first person they talk to after something happens,” shift supervisor Timmy Fischer said.
Director Judy Tucker has also been there from the start, and so have shift supervisors Fischer and Jenny Keener.
Fischer and Keener said it’s the desire to help people that has kept them working at the center for so long.
“It’s being a lifeline for them when everything’s happening,” Keener said.
Both had worked in related fields before coming to work there — Fisher as a firefighter and Keener in health care.
They have their happy stories — Keener remembers talking a distraught mother through how to respond when her infant had stopped breathing. By the time responders arrived, the baby was breathing again and came out of the incident unharmed.
But they also have the ones they don’t want to talk about. They’ve answered a call to have one of their relatives in distress on the other end, and talked to people they’ve known since childhood during emergencies.
Overall, they learn to be detached enough to focus on seeing to it the people get the services they need, but that’s only part of what it takes to be a good dispatcher, Tucker said.
The other biggest factor is an ability to multitask. Dispatching is notorious for being a job with heavy turnover, and she said one of the biggest aids she’s found in reducing that turnover is a test that measures a person’s ability to complete several tasks at once.
In addition to looking for people who can handle that, she has to see to it new dispatchers get mandated training before they start working and each year after that.
“They actually have 80 hours of training before they ever take a call,” she said. That includes training as emergency dispatchers, meaning they’re all qualified to guide a person in providing first aid until first responders arrive.
Sevier County dispatchers have overseen 33,877 of those calls in the past 10 years, she said.
The county medical director helps oversee their training requirements, but Tucker provides the training to most officers, along with in-service training to complete requirements that they continue their education.
With all that help, along with software and hardware designed to help them, they have a lot of resources at their command. And they work as a team.
“A lot of times when a phone rings, if other dispatchers aren’t working a call already, they’ll pick up, too,” she said. That allows the other dispatchers to start calling emergency responders and getting help to the scene while the one who’s talking the victim is keeping them calm and doing whatever they can to stabilize the situation.
‘It’s stressful,” Tucker said,” But we’ve got to keep that sense of urgency the whole time.”
jfarrell@themountainpress.com
Post a Comment