About 75% of respondents said the high-stress nature of the job was the major factor in staffing shortages, while about 65% said low pay was a significant deterrent. About 25% said the needed more training around mental health calls.Ģ. About 38% of those surveyed said they were not well prepared to handle active shooter calls. ![]() Some other findings in the survey include:ġ. Holmes said she also thinks the technology upgrade could draw more young people to the industry. Earlier this month, the 911 center in Oakland, California, experienced two outages that forced operators to manually handle 911 calls and delayed response times. It could also mean fewer outages to phone or computer systems, which 60% of survey respondents said happen regularly. Advocates say the technology would mean more precise location tracking, better access to immediate language translation, the ability to text with callers or take video calls to help see what’s going on in the case of a medical emergency. The technology, called Next Generation 911, would convert the hard-wired centers to digital internet protocol-based technology. ![]() The group has also been advocating for a bill that would spend $15 billion equipping centers across the country with newer technology that Fontes and others said would address some of the other issues 911 workers noted in the survey. “Iowa has been trying to incorporate them into their state retirement system for public safety personnel, but the legal review came back and said they couldn’t do that because of how these employees are classified,” Fontes said. The change would boost morale by more accurately describing the role of 911 workers and open doors locally to include those workers in benefits programs offered to police and others, he said. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ classification of 911 workers from office or clerical workers to protected service workers like other emergency responders. Meanwhile, in New York City, panicked callers this month tried to report a Department of Transportation truck that had caught fire and exploded, but said they received busy signals or were sent to voicemail.īrian Fontes, CEO of NENA, said the group has been advocating for national legislation to change the U.S. He died, but he was alive when his mother started calling 911, according to a family spokeswoman. During the same storm in the suburbs, it took a woman 45 minutes to report that her 5-year-old son had been badly hurt by a tree falling on their home. In St Louis this month, callers tried desperately to report that a woman was trapped in her car under a fallen tree but said they couldn’t get through for nearly half an hour. The findings show the widespread nature of staffing problems that have been laid bare in some communities in recent years. ![]() It found that many were experiencing burnout, handling more frequent call surges and felt undertrained. The survey conducted by the National Emergency Number Association in conjunction with Carbyne, a cloud technology company focused on emergency services, polled about 850 workers from 911 call centers across the country. Emergency call center workers say their centers are understaffed, struggling to fill vacancies and plagued by worker burnout, according to a national survey released Tuesday.
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