Identification of persons based on verbal descriptions
is one of the key skills of police work. This includes
identifying suspects, but also locating missing persons,
identifying a person needing help in a public assist call, or
finding and helping a person who is threatening suicide.
Correct identification can lead to reduced loss of life,
reunions of missing persons with their loved ones, and
apprehension of suspects, while incorrect identification
can have terrible unintended consequences for both
officers and civilians.
Traffic incidents (collisions and crashes) are among the
most common call types handled by Emergency
Communication Centers (ECCs). They are also among the
most complex call types because they represent such
a range of possible situations. These can range from
“fender benders” with no injuries and little or no property
damage—in which case a single law enforcement officer
might be an appropriate response—to mass-casualty
events involving trains, buses, or other large, multipassenger vehicles.
Since our last issue was released in early January 2021, we have moved into a new stage of the COVID-19 pandemic—one of great promise, but also new dangers. It has been said by numerous epidemiological experts that we are now in a race to vaccinate enough of the population to stem the disease spread, before new and more potent virus variants threaten to ravage the world. Weathering more than a year of this pandemic makes it truly remarkable that so many dispatch agencies continue to perform at...
As we begin a new year and close the books on 2020, uncertainty, disruption, and stressful conditions continue all around us. Public safety and public health services have been pushed to their extremes throughout much of the last year. The fallout from this extended effort, with all its accompanying tension and strain, will surely be studied for years to come. Yet even before this current crisis existed, emergency telecommunicators faced many challenges. In this issue, two groups of...
Caller-party type may determine the accuracy of the information collected by the EMD. Has this distribution changed in the past decade? Are EMD’s gathering more accurate information? And why is the caller party dynamic changing? The objective is to retrospectively look at the distribution of the caller-party type in a mostly urban/suburban, high performance EMS system. ProQA data from 2004 to 2017 was extracted and evaluated to identify any trends. This was a retrospective, descriptive, and uncontrolled study of de-identified medical dispatch data, collected using ProQA data from an...
So far, it's been a year like no other—and that has been especially true for emergency dispatch agencies and the responders for which they dispatch. While the COVID-19 outbreak is far from over, it appears that emergency services and public safety agencies have adjusted to our new normal quite effectively—albeit still with much uncertainty about the future. In coming issues, we expect to publish more on the pandemic as new research is completed and more cases of interest become available. However, for now, we are temporarily setting...
Structure fires, although infrequent, require significant resources and personnel to effectively complete critical tasks in a short time frame to achieve positive outcomes. While it is important to dispatch the appropriate number of resources rapidly, there is a risk to over-allocate responding resources both to the public and to the responders by responding with lights and siren. A standardized emergency fire dispatch (EFD) protocol-based system is important to quickly identify working structures fires so appropriate resources are allocated in an effective manner...
Abdominal pain is the most common symptom with which patients present to the emergency department (ED), and overall visits to EDs in the U.S. are growing twice as fast as the overall population. Interventions that can safely mitigate such a high usage of ED resources would be a great asset in the delivery of effective and efficient ED care. One such intervention is a secondary triage of patients calling 911 for an ambulance who were subsequently triaged as a non-urgent low-acuity caller. Emergency medical services (EMS) using secondary...
As I write this from my workplace office—realizing I'm one of only a few people in our organization who's not working from home this week—I feel it's important to recognize that most emergency dispatchers don't get to choose the work-from-home option. If that's you, then you know the drill; you must brave going out of the house, working side-by-side with your co-workers, practicing social distancing the best you can, wearing your mask whenever possible, disinfecting your workspace frequently, and enduring all the other risks...
When evaluating the information provided by 911 callers, Emergency Police Dispatchers (EPDs) use scripted protocols to ensure that important details are not missed and that questions are not omitted. Specifically, at the beginning of the call, EPDs ask callers to "Tell me exactly what happened" (TMEWH). Since EPDs must select the correct Chief Complaint (CC) Protocol based on the caller's response, getting a complete response to TMEWH—and interpreting it correctly—is one of the most significant elements of an EPD's job. However, no studies have yet evaluated the use of TMEWH in gathering...
