Seeking peer support when stressful conditions occur may seem like a natural and common occurrence among emergency dispatchers. Yet we lack complete information about how often it happens, and how helpful it really is. A repeat AEDR author and researcher, Paul Bourgeois, PhD., brings this practice into focus in this journal issue. Using an online survey, Bourgeois questions dispatchers about their utilization of, and attitudes toward peer support teams. His findings and conclusions will help us better
understand the best use of these teams and when to encourage dispatchers to seek help from them.
Most UK ambulance services undertake a secondary assessment of 999 calls with nurses and paramedics to best manage delays in responses and reduce inappropriate admissions to hospitals. However, little is known about the differences in the types of cases managed by the two professions comparatively, their clinical outcomes, and the quality and safety they offer.
Years ago, when I worked in a 911 center, I don’t ever remember hearing the terms “vicarious trauma,” or “compassion fatigue.”
Occasionally “burnout” was mentioned to describe how we felt after long stretches of intense work; although it mostly expressed
years of exhaustion and time spent in the emergency dispatch center. Not much attention was given to the day-to-day stress and
mental trauma that was happening along the way.
Occupational Identity is a term used to describe how a person sees themself as a worker. Researchers have studied how one’s identity at work affects not only one’s occupational success, but their attitudes, experiences, and emotions both inside and outside of the workplace. Our featured research article in this issue, written by Violet (Lisa) Rymshaw, PsyD, provides valuable insights on occupational identity among emergency dispatchers—a profession that is sometimes given short shrift within the realm of emergency services occupations.
There can be several barriers to performing effective CPR on patients who call 911 service for help. One of the most challenging barriers is repositioning a patient found by the caller in a prone position i.e., on his/her belly. Existing medical dispatch pre-arrival instructions (on Medical Priority Dispatch System [MPDS®] Protocols Panel C2) provide no specific scripted instructions for repositioning the patient from prone to supine.
The ‘Great Resignation,’ as it has been dubbed by many, did not spare emergency dispatch agencies. Indeed, emergency service agencies, including dispatch centers, may have been impacted even worse than most other employers. This is particularly unwelcome news, given the already long-standing staffing and recruiting difficulties in the profession. This phenomenon of employees leaving their jobs in large numbers appears to have started sometime after COVID-19 swept across the world in 2020. Several factors, including fear of being exposed to COVID, opportunities to work from home at a new job, and poor pa
The speedy spread of the global outbreak of COVID-19 called for rapid deployment of tools to monitor its trends. In January 2020, the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch® (IAED) released an official statement about the novel coronavirus with specific guidelines for our Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS)-user agencies to use the Emerging Infectious Disease Surveillance (EIDS) Tool for Sick Person (Protocol 26), Breathing Problems (Protocol 6), and other Chief Complaints where the caller offers information leading the emergency medical dispatcher (EMD) to suspect a respiratory-type illness.
Research has showed that heart attacks present clinically with varying symptoms; and those symptoms are not always described by patients as chest pain or chest discomfort. Emergency Medical Dispatchers (EMDs) using the Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS™) are trained to select the Chest Pain/Chest Discomfort Protocol for non-chest pain heart attack symptoms or classic heart attack complaint of chest pain/chest discomfort. Nevertheless, it is still unknown how often callers report heart attack symptoms other than chest pain/chest discomfort, including what specific words/phrases they use to describe
The difficulty of evaluating the mental status, particularly alertness, is more pronounced in the medical dispatch context, where the Emergency Medical Dispatcher (EMD) must work through the eyes and ears of the caller, who is most likely a layperson. Determining true non-alertness and the level of its effects on outcome needs to be solved to perfect the interrogation and response-coding processes at dispatch.
