Tag: Chad Perkins

Dispatchers ask for help dealing with PTSD, seek ‘first responder’ designation

      The state’s 911 dispatchers are urging lawmakers to add them to the state’s legal definition of “first responders,” before the legislative session ends.  Some of them visited the Capitol to share personal stories illustrating why they need the help in dealing with post-traumatic stress that comes with that designation.

Representative Chad Perkins (R-Bowling Green) is among the legislators who has carried legislation aimed at extending mental health services to dispatchers. (Photo: Tim Bommel, Missouri House Communications)

      First responders – which state statute currently defines as firefighters, law enforcement personnel, and emergency medical personnel – are afforded mental health resources, and several legislators say those should also be available to dispatchers.   

      Representative Lane Roberts (R-Joplin) has been Joplin’s Police Chief and the state’s Director of Public Safety, among other things in his career of more than 40 years.  Throughout all of that time he worked with dispatchers and even worked as one at times.

      “We have always underappreciated these folks.  They’re kind of out of sight, out of mind.  They work in a windowless environment, but they are the first of the first responders.  They’re the gateway to public safety,” said Roberts.  “Every time they get an emergency call they get an adrenaline dump just like people who work in the field do.  The difference is, the people in the field get to go somewhere, take action, use those chemicals, while the dispatcher will simply move on to the next call, take those chemicals home at night and go to sleep with them and suffer the health consequences.”

      Independence representative Robert Sauls (D) was a prosecutor in Jackson County and a public defender.

“As a former prosecutor I would regularly listen to 911 calls and what happens in those circumstances and … often times people are contacting 911 operators on their worst day.  Something’s happening, they’re scared, it’s a very stressful situation, and all of these 911 operators are under these stressful environments and the thing of it is, you’ve got to go on to the next one.  You’ve gotten your one situation settled, you hang up the phone, and you’ve got another one.  I think it’s very important to recognize these people as first responders.”

      Polk County 911 Director Sarah Newell said what she and her colleagues do is often dismissed as just answering phones or clerical work.

“It’s not.  We are the first point, so how that call goes is dependent on that dispatcher.  How fast that call gets put out, what information gets put out, resource allocation and knowing and forward thinking to say, ‘they’re probably going to need an ambulance on standby so let’s go ahead and roll one of those,’ so all things that they have to think about out of the box at any given time.”

      J.R. Webb, the Assistant Director of Springfield/Green County 911, said dispatchers, “have to be able to do a lot of things at once.  They have to be able to take that phone call, at the same time they’re typing that information into a computer, at the same time that they may be dealing with first responders on the radio.  The multitasking is incredible in a busy situation, and it takes a special kind of person to be able to do that.  It takes a kind of type ‘A,’ take charge personality to succeed at our job and it’s not meant for everybody.”

      The Chair of the State 911 Board of Governance, Alan Wells, said “Post-traumatic stress is a big, big thing for our 911 telecommunicators, and as of right now they do not have a lot of resources there to help with that.”

“Turnover is a big problem, burnout is a big problem that affects this industry, so we hope to be able to give them all the benefits necessary to sustain a good, long-lasting career,” said Wells.

Representative Robert Sauls also carries legislation intended to include dispatchers in the state’s legal definition of “first responders.” (Photo: Tim Bommel, Missouri House Communications)

      He said it’s not uncommon for dispatchers, especially in the smaller communities throughout Missouri, to know personally the people involved in the incidents they are handling.

      “Sometimes it can be very horrifying for those operators,” said Wells.  “It may be a loved one, a family member, an immediate family member, or in our case it was one of our own 911 call takers who had just left his shift, headed home on his motorcycle and hit a deer and it was a fatality.  The same operators that were just working with him had to take that call and work that incident.”

      Hailey Brunner is in her fourth year as a dispatcher at the Cass Co Sheriff’s Office.  She remembered one week in which her rotation, “worked seven fatalities, whether it be between an accident, people harming themselves, anything of that nature, natural deaths, anything, and it’s just a wide variety, whether it’s young kids to old kids.  My most recent one was a two year-old who died in a fatality car accident.”

      Blake Johnson has been dispatching for five years in Green County.  He said there is one call he’ll always remember. 

“I had taken a call from a family who had lost a child and I can still hear the mom screaming for her kid.  It’s absolutely horrible and it makes it worse when you actually know who those people are.”

      Newell said, “I have a dispatcher who actually worked a motor vehicle accident.  It was a rollover with ejection.  There were four juveniles in the vehicle.  She took the call and … right before she was ready to dispatch, she realized it was her son in the vehicle.”

      Brunner said dispatchers can’t help but imagine the scenes that they are hearing play out over the phone, and that can result in very vivid and very upsetting imagery. 

“You’re hearing all of this stuff that’s going on, on the phone.  You’re hearing the screams and … they’re painting a picture for you, so you have this picture in your mind of what it looks like and it could be completely the opposite of what they actually see on the scene.  It could be better, it could be worse.  We never quite know.”

      Webb said worse still, dispatchers often get no closure at the end of a call.

“You’re sending folks to help these people that are yelling and screaming at you and in their worst day, then you don’t really know for sure when the other first responders go there, and how this call turned out,” said Webb.

Representative Lane Roberts (Photo: Tim Bommel, Missouri House Communications)

      He said an increasing number of suicides in Missouri also directly impacts dispatchers. 

“It could be someone, honestly, wanting an audience while they commit suicide.  That happens way too much.”

      Some call centers, like that at Springfield, have mental health resources that are made available to dispatchers there and in surrounding communities.  Such resources aren’t available to all dispatchers in Missouri, though, especially in many smaller communities. 

      Several bills would address PTSD and mental health resources for dispatchers and other first responders.  These dispatchers and lawmakers are among those who hope at least one of those bills is passed before the session’s end on May 12.

House acts to recognize and support 911 dispatchers

      The House has advanced multiple efforts this session to recognize the service of, and difficulties faced by, 911 dispatchers.  Three House bills include language that would add dispatchers to state statute’s definition of “first responders,” which would give them access to more support and benefits. A bipartisan group of lawmakers thinks it’s about time.

Representative Shane Roden (Photo: Tim Bommel, Missouri House Communications)

      Legislators say dispatchers are vitally important and are the first link in the chain of emergency response. 

      “They’re the first contact when you call 911,” said Representative Robert Sauls (D-Kansas City), who offered one such amendment to a bill that was sent to the Senate (House Bill 1637).  “Obviously you talk to an operator, and they have to go through a lot of stuff.  They have to go through a lot of turmoil, subject to very high intensity, stressful situations.”

      Because dispatchers aren’t considered “first responders,” they aren’t afforded benefits seen by EMTs, firefighters, police, and others.  That includes health and retirement benefits, but also help to deal with the stress of their job.  Lawmakers think that needs to change.

      Representative Lane Roberts (R-Joplin), whose extensive law enforcement career included time as Joplin’s police chief and director of the state’s Department of Public Safety, said, “I was a police officer for 43 years, and in my wildest nightmare I can’t imagine doing what those people do.”

“The fact that we have failed to recognize them as an integral part of the first response community, I think, is a real disservice to them.  They do their share and then some.  They’re often underappreciated.  They’re just a voice at the end of the radio frequency and people just forget how important they are.  Without them a lot of people get hurt.”

      Representative Chad Perkins (R-Bowling Green) worked for four years as a dispatcher.  He filed one of the bills to make dispatchers “first responders” (House Bill 1676, approved by one House committee).  He said this is the most stressful job in the field.

Representative Robert Sauls (Photo: Tim Bommel, Missouri House Communications)

      “The phone is ringing and its multiple phone calls, especially in one of those really high stressful situations.  You’ve got the phone ringing off the hook, a dozen people calling you, someone screaming at you in their greatest moment of need, you can’t visualize what’s happening because you’re not actually there but you’ve got to get that information, you have to take it down well and effectively and then put that information back out clearly to someone else who’s going.  It is an incredibly stressful job.  I think it is the most high-stress job in all of emergency services.  A person has to multitask at a very high level.”

      Roberts agreed, “Any time as a police officer I got a call, particularly for something of an emergency, we got that adrenaline rush that anybody else gets.  The dispatchers got the same adrenaline rush when they’re on the phone.  The difference is that when I got to the scene of that emergency that adrenaline is something that helped me deal with the issue.  The dispatchers, on the other hand, simply hang up and go on to the next emergency.  At night they’ll take all that adrenaline, those chemicals that come with that rush, and take it home with them.  They don’t get that same opportunity to use that.”

      Roberts and Perkins agree that dispatching is more than answering the phone and relaying a call.  Operators receive training for multiple contingencies and emergencies.

      “I’ve heard them do CPR instructions over the phone.  I’ve heard them talk about getting people out of fires over the phone, delivering babies over the phone,” said Roberts.

      Because of the high stress they face, on top of regularly updated training and often low pay, advocates say people who work as dispatchers rarely do it for very long.  Some areas of the state are having a hard time filling vacancies in call centers.

Representative Chad Perkins (Photo: Tim Bommel, Missouri House Communications)

      Perkins said by adding them to the definition of “first responders,” they would be afforded more state benefits.  This could be part of a larger effort to recruit and retain operators.

“You have some health-related benefits to it but there’s also, for the most part in the State of Missouri, first responders can retire on the LAGERS system at 55, so that would be something that would also be an added benefit as opposed to having to retire at 60 or 62.”

      Representative Shane Roden (R-Cedar Hill) is a firefighter and paramedic as well as a reserve sheriff’s deputy.  His House Bill 2381 has received initial approval in the House and contains the “first responder” definition language. 

He told his colleagues, “For the dispatchers that have always been there for us this is a step in the right direction, to acknowledge that they are the first responders that they are.”