Caller, Can You Hear Me? New D.C. Comms Center to Improve 9-1-1 Response, Authorities Hope
When the governor of Virginia came to the grand opening, he conceded that the District of Columbia's new Unified Communications Center was better than his own. At the same event, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff joked that he had "command center envy."
As beleaguered as D.C.'s public-safety/emergency-response providers and institutions have been in recent years, it's a welcome bit of good news that the District now has a state-of-the-art nerve center that promises to better streamline and integrate its responses not only to day-to-day events, but should a major incident ever occur.
The $116 million facility, which opened in September, occupies nearly 140,000 square feet of space on the campus of St. Elizabeth's Hospital-the only fully secure federally owned campus in the D.C. area. It houses key communications functions for D.C. fire/EMS, police and emergency management, as well as the mayor's emergency command center. In a disaster, it will serve as a base for regional law enforcement and medical and other first responders, and potentially federal authorities too.
The improvements are both technological and human.
"We've upgraded our technology so it's fresher," says Michael Latessa, director of the District's Office of Unified Communications. "The networks are faster, the servers are faster-everything's faster. Since we've opened, we've used, at our peak load, only about 2% of our processing capability on the telephony side. And it also gives us a capability of expanding to almost three times our size on an immediate basis. We have a backup facility on hot standby that's linked and paralleled with our primary site, so that literally, at a moment's notice, we can staff that up and take calls and dispatch at both locations simultaneously. It gives us more expandability, scalability and flexibility than we've had in the past."
That'll be needed if and when another Big One comes to D.C. (to this end, the UCC can be wholly self-sustaining-with its own power, water and air-for up to 72 hours). But in a jurisdiction where, at one time, up to 40% of 9-1-1 callers never got through, it's the day-to-day improvements that are likely to be noticed by the citizen on the street.
More callers are getting through more often-the rate of dropped calls is now around 4%. Some of the factors behind the improvement are technological, but others are distinctly human. "Nobody could even explain on a basic level what they were doing," Latessa told USA Today. "Mediocre performance was considered outstanding. We had to erase 20–30 years of bad habits."
That's been ongoing, and by this year, call-takers, who are trained to handle both law enforcement and fire/EMS calls, were expected to have 95% of those calls answered in less than five seconds. On October 1, that rate jumped to 97.5%. And they're more accountable now for getting the facts right.
"We also measure things like dispatching and call-taking errors," says Latessa. "On the EMS side, we're starting to measure dispatch-to-outcome kinds of things more closely. If a call went out as an Alpha or a Bravo when it was really a Charlie or a Delta, was it because we didn't get the right information, we didn't process the right information or we weren't told the right information?"
This is part of a robust QA process that ranges from simple live listening to hard-core data analysis. Bosses now track things like call counts and process times and time not ready to take calls. For radio operators, it's things like queue-to-dispatch times. And superior performance is rewarded with things like cash bonuses.
"People can literally see, on an hour-by-hour basis, many of the elements we measure," says Latessa. "We've become a very metric-driven organization, so the supervisors have to have a handle, from a productivity and production standpoint, on how well the day is going."
In other EMS News
Final Public-Safety Death-Benefit Rule Published
Three years after the Hometown Heroes Survivors Benefit Act mandated changes in the federal Public Safety Officers' Benefits (PSOB) program, the Justice Department has issued revised regulations to govern the awards.
The new regulations, published in the Federal Register in August, took effect Sept. 11. Effective coverage dates did not change, however, meaning that certain line-of-duty stroke and heart attack deaths occurring since Dec. 15, 2003, are covered.
Under the revised rules, deaths of public-safety officers due to stroke or heart attack while engaged in emergency response or training, or within 24 hours of such activity or exercise, are presumed to be line-of-duty deaths. -International Association of Fire Fighters
