Taking 911 calls, remaining calm and talking someone through a crisis while relaying vital information to emergency responders is a tough job with high demands and often higher stakes.
In dispatch centers across the United States, it’s also often a job with high vacancies and turnovers.
According to a 2023 survey report by the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch and the National Association of State 911 Administrators, the average vacancy rate in centers around the country was about 25% from 2019 through 2022, an increase of 5% from the pre-COVID-19 pandemic era.
The 911 industry’s turnover rate is around 18%, according to city data.
For Durango Emergency Communications, the turnover rate in 2022 was 106%, and its training program had a turnover rate of 99% compared to the industrywide trainee turnover rate of 70% to 75%, or about three in every four applicants, said Kati Fox, emergency communications director. One of 15 trainees completed the training program that year.
Durango Emergency Communications Operations Manager Waverly Lopez said trainees often start the program strong, but by the time they’ve reached the end of it and they’re in a true dispatcher’s workflow – handling a radio channel while taking calls in a fast-paced, weighty environment – it all blows up.
“That’s the difficult part, just being able to manage that workload. Because there’s not really any other job that can prepare you for that,” she said.
Changing attitudes about work-life balance during the pandemic did not help 911 centers retain trainees and staff members, Fox said. The public sector was having a hard enough time bouncing back in 2022 without a culture shift to contend with.
“I worked here from 2009 to 2019, and I think in that 10-year stretch, we were fully staffed for six months of it,” she said. “... Pandemic or not, that’s already there.”
Demands for remote work, part-time positions and added flexibility becoming more popular also did not help retention rates.
“We work so hard to be accommodating and mindful of our crew’s work-life balance and support them in that. But the reality is, you have to have a center staffed at a certain level,” Fox said.
That’s 24 hours a day, seven days a week, she said. A 911 center is not and has never been the right place for flexible workforce demands.
By 2024, Durango Emergency Communications managed to cut its training program turnover down to 50%, below the industry average, after revamping its program the year before. Lopez said a shift in focus to individual trainee’s strengths and challenges helped.
“We’re really diving in and figuring out what is hard for each individual trainee, versus, like, a blanket system of ‘this is hard for most people, so it’ll probably be hard for you,’” she said. “We can really identify the areas where each individual trainee is having shortcomings, and then we can start addressing those a lot sooner to zero up and really get them through the program.”
Durango’s 911 center receives name change
Durango’s 911 center, formerly known as the Durango/La Plata Emergency Communications Center, received a name change, Kati Fox, 911 communications director, told The Durango Herald last month.
The center’s new name is Durango Emergency Communications.
She said nearly all 911 centers in Colorado are named based on their governing body and the change was made to reflect the center’s controlling entity, the city of Durango in this case. The center still provides emergency communications to La Plata County.
She said training is becoming more curated to the individual trainee’s needs.
Fox said the center’s revamped training program is also providing quantitative data from weekly assessments about trainees’ progression through the program. It’s a step up from the old way of doing things, a casual verbal evaluation.
The center also looks after its dispatchers’ mental health. She said high priority calls involving severe circumstances that could traumatize dispatchers are reviewed.
Lopez said feedback is part of the job in 911 centers, and dispatchers are hungry for it.
“Everyone just seems to appreciate that someone’s paying attention to them and wants them to do the best they can,” she said.
The center is also collecting feedback from callers on a monthly basis, she said. One criticism the center often gets is callers feel like 911 dispatchers’ lines of questions are slowing down emergency response times – but that is not the case.
“The person who’s taking your phone call might be the person who’s also dispatching it, but we’re doing them simultaneously,” she said. “Our asking of questions is not delaying somebody being sent. They’ve already been sent, and we’re asking questions so that they know what they’re walking into.”
The standard for 911 response times, according to the National Emergency Number Association, is 90% of emergency calls should be answered within 15 seconds and 95% of calls should be answered in 20 seconds or less, she said. Durango Emergency Communications exceeds those criteria with 97% of calls answered within 15 seconds and 99% of calls answered within 20 seconds.
“We really pride ourselves on … our culture and the dedication of leadership, of our administrative leadership, of our shift supervisors on the floor and our operations leadership team,” Fox said. “... Without dispatchers, you don’t have dispatch. Taking care of our operations crew is paramount,” she said.
Fox said the 911 industry is rapidly changing. In so many ways, technological advancements have improved the efficiency of emergency dispatch. But those advancements have also amplified the amount of information dispatchers have to process and relay in real time.
Fox recalled having three monitors and one keyboard when she first joined Durango Emergency Communications about 16 years ago. Back then, she said, the center had a phone, a radio and the Computer-Aided Dispatch system. Today, dispatchers have eight monitors running numerous systems and programs such as body camera access for police, RapidSOS, School Safe, location access and radio bridging capabilities.
“There’s been a steep curve in terms of technological advancement and the workload demand,” she said. “... What they’re expected to do out there is wildly different from 16 years ago.”
Durango Emergency Communications received 18,815 emergency 911 calls in 2024, according to call data. Fox said the center consistently scored four out of five in community surveys taken once per quarter by people who relied on 911 services.
According to a City Council study session agenda document, when current trainees complete their on-the-job training program, the center will be at 59% operational staffing. It is at 85% administrative staffing, with six of seven administrative positions filled.
cburney@durangoherald.com
