The time it takes some emergency call centers to answer the phone is alarming some communities.
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.
“The numbers we’re seeing right now are really alarming. It was a major impetus of why we did this study. I knew it was going to be high, but 82% of respondents said their centers were understaffed,” said Karima Holmes, vice president and head of public safety at Carbyne and former director of the Office of Unified Communications in Washington, D.C.
Brian Fontes, CEO of NENA, said the group has been advocating for national legislation to change the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ classification of 911 workers from office or clerical workers to protected service workers like other emergency responders. 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.
It could also mean fewer outages to phone or computer systems, which 60% of survey respondents said happen regularly. Earlier this month, the 911 center in Oakland, California, experienced two outages that forced operators to manually handle 911 calls and delayed response times.Some other findings in the survey include:
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