I missed this in November 2009/Chaos Theory

but it is important and relevant to what is going on in Tallahassee. my opinion first:

my opinion: I would like to say to Rick Jones, that my family and other families who have suffered through 9-1-1 tragedies, know the cost of training. It cost my daughter-in-law her life. And you can spend all your monies on the best technologies in the world, but if you do not have people who know how to use them appropriately those technologies are worthless. My daughter in law's life was priceless.

Chaos Theory
Nov 1, 2009 12:00 PM

By Glenn Bischoff (glenn.bischoff@penton.com)

Protocols and intuitive managers are key to reducing dispatcher pressure in 911 call centers.

Nathan Lee returned to his Florida home in the middle of the afternoon on Jan. 17, 2008. When he arrived, he found his two sons — a 2-year-old and a 6-month-old — together in the younger boy's crib. His wife and the boys' mother, Denise Amber Lee, was nowhere to be found.

She was found two days later in a shallow grave after being brutally raped. In the first frenetic hours after her abduction, mistakes allegedly were made by a 911 call-taker and dispatchers that hampered the search effort. Today, her family and friends are wondering why no national training and certification program exists for 911 telecommunicators, which they believe would help professionals in the sector better keep their wits in an intrinsically high-stress environment that becomes a crucible when things hit the fan.

Not on Alert

The first 911 call on the day of Denise Lee's abduction was placed by Nathan Lee. The 911 center that took that call and two others promptly issued BOLO (“Be On the LookOut for”) signals that allegedly were missed by the 911 center in an adjacent county. At some point during the ordeal, the assailant drove through that county with Denise Lee in tow.

Later in the afternoon, a witness called 911 to report that a child in the back seat of a green Camaro was pounding on the window and screaming hysterically. The “child” was Denise Lee, according to Peggy Lee, the victim's mother in law. According to Lee's family, that call was received by the same 911 center that allegedly missed the BOLOs issued after Nathan Lee's 911 calls. Somehow, the family alleges, no BOLO ever was issued for the call from the eyewitness nor were police cruisers dispatched, even though the eyewitness provided cross streets at several junctures until the car carrying Denise Lee peeled off onto another road.

Peggy Lee today serves as the community relations director for the Denise Amber Lee Foundation, which is lobbying for training and procedural reforms in the 911 sector. She has heard the recording from the eyewitness call and said the call-taker became flustered during the nine minutes she was on the line with the eyewitness. “That call-taker didn't know what to do — you could hear the chaos,” she said.

Denise Lee's father works in that county as a police detective. He said in an interview on a network-television newsmagazine that a fellow officer told him that the officer was certain the vehicle drove “right by him” but did not pursue, because “he never received the information.”

Local media reported that the county's sheriff defended the performance of the 911 center's call-takers and dispatchers that night but acknowledged that mistakes were made. Reportedly, two dispatchers were suspended as a result of this incident.

During the ordeal, Denise Lee somehow managed to get her hands on the assailant's wireless phone without him knowing and placed her own 911 call. She cleverly gave the call-taker vital information, such as the type of car, by speaking in a way that made her assailant think she was talking to him. After seven minutes the assailant caught on and the call ended. “That call was handled superbly,” Peggy Lee said. (Since this was quoted we have come to find out that the call was not handled "superbly" but it was handled well. The call taker was new, on few short months on the job, and has since had to move out of state because Denise's call effected her so greatly.)


However, Denise Lee's location couldn't be identified by the 911 system because she used a pre-paid wireless phone to place the call.

Unanswered Questions

The television newsmagazine posed this question: Could Denise Lee have been saved if the call-taker and dispatchers had kept their cool? It's a question that haunts her family.

Consequently, the Denise Amber Lee Foundation is lobbying for the creation of a national certification program for 911 call-takers and dispatchers. “We want to ensure that no other family has to endure the pure hell our family has experienced,” said Nathan Lee during this year's National Emergency Number Association (NENA) conference in Fort Worth, Texas.

Craig Whittington, NENA's newly elected president, who spent six years on the organization's educational committee before joining its executive board in 2007, is in favor of such a program. “You have to be certified to operate a tanning booth, but for 911 — the most critical link in emergency response — there is no certification,” Whittington said.

While a good idea, a national program likely would be difficult to create and maintain, said Rick Jones, NENA's director of operations. Funding would be at the heart of that difficulty. “When you address the need for training and certification, you indeed are going to escalate their costs,” he said.

Protocols and intuitive managers are key to reducing dispatcher pressure in 911 call centers.

Jones said that 911 call centers ideally would allocate 5% of their operating budgets for training but acknowledged that such a goal would be unrealistic for many, if not most, centers in the current economic environment. “Their training has been cut, and their practice time has been reduced for various reasons, [but] basically economic,” Jones said. “That starts to have a negative effect.”


The negative effect is three-fold. Rigorous ongoing training, core-competency standards and proficiency tests would increase the likelihood that call-takers and dispatchers act properly and — perhaps more important — instinctively. This, in turn, would make them more competent and confident, leading to reduced stress. And the less stressed that call-takers and dispatchers are, the less likely they are to lose their composure and make mistakes at crucial moments.


But such training, standards and testing largely are absent in the 911 world, a fact that Gordon Graham, the keynote speaker at NENA's conference, noted. Graham, a former California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer turned litigator and educator specializing in risk management, said, “Once you are hired, you will never have to take another test if you don't want to be promoted. The public deserves better.”

Grace Under Pressure

To illustrate the point, Graham spoke of US Airways Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who landed his airplane in New York City's Hudson River in January after several birds flew into the craft's engines, rendering them inoperable. According to Graham, Sullenberger said in an interview shortly after his heroic actions saved the lives of everyone aboard Flight 1549 that he tried, throughout his flying career, to make small deposits each day into his memory bank, knowing that one day he would “have to make a massive withdrawal.”


It was a sound strategy, Graham said, because doing so enabled Sullenberger to make instantaneous, life-and-death decisions on that fateful day. It's a lesson especially adaptable to the public-safety sector, whose personnel make such decisions on a daily basis.


“You will run into the unthinkable event someday, and you will have to make instantaneous decisions,” Graham said. “Whether you are prepared to do so is up to you.”


To prepare, Jones recommended that 911 emergency call centers at least implement protocols that every telecommunicator follows for every call the center receives. He suggested that centers adopt the protocols already established by the National Academies of Emergency Dispatch, the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) Institute or PowerPhone (a provider of crisis communications training), and resist the temptation to create their own.


“That's dangerous, because a local agency doesn't have the expertise,” said Jones, who further cautioned that centers also should resist altering the national protocols, because “sometimes they over-modify them.”


Emergency call center managers also can play an important role in reducing the stress encountered by 911 call-takers and dispatchers, according to Steve Wisely, director of APCO's Communications Center and 911 services department. He said managers should be trained to have a calming effect on telecommunicators. “It's important that the supervisory leadership has training that will allow them to act in a calm manner, even when high-profile incidents are underway,” Wisely said. “The supervisors set the tone for the workers that are reporting to them.”


It's also important that supervisors recognize when a call-taker or dispatcher needs to decompress or a shoulder to lean on for a few minutes, Wisely said. “A support system needs to be in place where a person can get out of their seat and go to a quiet place to contemplate [an incident] or talk to somebody, if they're troubled by it,” he said.

This article originally appeared in Urgent Communications, a FIRE CHIEF sister publication.

http://firechief.com/training/ar/reduce-911-dispatcher-pressure-200911/index.html

"Chaos Theory" from Urgent Communications

In light of DateLine airing again tonight, I thought I'd post this to update persons new to the case on what the foundation is doing and what we're fighting for. We so hope and pray such errors are minimized and that more people don't have to die needlessly. Denise's tragedy is not an isolated incident. Problems happen more than most people know. We can improve this folks! And people truly are out there trying but we need your help!

Jul 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Glenn Bischoff

Protocols and intuitive managers are key to reducing pressure in 911 centers.

Nathan Lee returned to his Florida home in the middle of the afternoon on Jan. 17, 2008. When he arrived, he found his two sons — a 2-year-old and a 6-month-old — together in the younger boy's crib. His wife and the boys' mother, Denise Amber Lee, was nowhere to be found.

She was found two days later in a shallow grave after being brutally raped. In the first frenetic hours after her abduction, mistakes allegedly were made by a 911 call-taker and dispatchers that hampered the search effort. Today, her family and friends are wondering why no national training and certification program exists for 911 telecommunicators, which they believe would help professionals in the sector better keep their wits in an intrinsically high-stress environment that becomes a crucible when things hit the fan.

The first 911 call on the day of Denise Lee's abduction was placed by Nathan Lee. The 911 center that took that call and two others promptly issued BOLO ("Be On the LookOut for") signals that allegedly were missed by the 911 center in an adjacent county. At some point during the ordeal, the assailant drove through that county with Denise Lee in tow.

Later in the afternoon, a witness called 911 to report that a child in the back seat of a green Camaro was pounding on the window and screaming hysterically. The "child" was Denise Lee, according to Peggy Lee, the victim's mother in law. According to Lee's family, that call was received by the same 911 center that allegedly missed the BOLOs issued after Nathan Lee's 911 calls. Somehow, the family alleges, no BOLO ever was issued for the call from the eyewitness nor were police cruisers dispatched, even though the eyewitness provided cross streets at several junctures until the car carrying Denise Lee peeled off onto another road.

Peggy Lee today serves as the community relations director for the Denise Amber Lee Foundation, which is lobbying for training and procedural reforms in the 911 sector. She has heard the recording from the eyewitness call and said the call-taker became flustered during the nine minutes she was on the line with the eyewitness. "That call-taker didn't know what to do — you could hear the chaos," she said.

Denise Lee's father works in that county as a police detective. He said in an interview on a network-television newsmagazine that a fellow officer told him that the officer was certain the vehicle drove "right by him" but did not pursue, because "he never received the information."

Local media reported that the county's sheriff defended the performance of the 911 center's call-takers and dispatchers that night but acknowledged that mistakes were made. Reportedly, two dispatchers were suspended as a result of this incident.

During the ordeal, Denise Lee somehow managed to get her hands on the assailant's wireless phone without him knowing and placed her own 911 call. She cleverly gave the call-taker vital information, such as the type of car, by speaking in a way that made her assailant think she was talking to him. After seven minutes the assailant caught on and the call ended. "That call was handled superbly," Peggy Lee said.

However, Denise Lee's location couldn't be identified by the 911 system because she used a pre-paid wireless phone to place the call.

The television newsmagazine posed this question: Could Denise Lee have been saved if the call-taker and dispatchers had kept their cool? It's a question that haunts her family.

Consequently, the Denise Amber Lee Foundation is lobbying for the creation of a national certification program for 911 call-takers and dispatchers. "We want to ensure that no other family has to endure the pure hell our family has experienced," said Nathan Lee during last month's National Emergency Number Association (NENA) conference in Fort Worth, Texas.

Craig Whittington, NENA's newly elected president, who spent six years on the organization's educational committee before joining its executive board in 2007, is in favor of such a program. "You have to be certified to operate a tanning booth, but for 911 — the most critical link in emergency response — there is no certification," Whittington said.

While a good idea, a national program likely would be difficult to create and maintain, said Rick Jones, NENA's director of operations. Funding would be at the heart of that difficulty. "When you address the need for training and certification, you indeed are going to escalate their costs," he said.

Jones said that 911 call centers ideally would allocate 5% of their operating budgets for training but acknowledged that such a goal would be unrealistic for many, if not most, centers in the current economic environment. "Their training has been cut, and their practice time has been reduced for various reasons, [but] basically economic," Jones said. "That starts to have a negative effect."

The negative effect is three-fold. Rigorous ongoing training, core-competency standards and proficiency tests would increase the likelihood that call-takers and dispatchers act properly and — perhaps more important — instinctively. This, in turn, would make them more competent and confident, leading to reduced stress. And the less stressed that call-takers and dispatchers are, the le
ss likely they are to lose their composure and make mistakes at crucial moments.

But such training, standards and testing largely are absent in the 911 world, a fact that Gordon Graham, the keynote speaker at NENA's conference, noted. Graham, a former California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer turned litigator and educator specializing in risk management, said, "Once you are hired, you will never have to take another test if you don't want to be promoted. The public deserves better."

To illustrate the point, Graham spoke of US Airways Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, who landed his airplane in New York City's Hudson River in January after several birds flew into the craft's engines, rendering them inoperable. According to Graham, Sullenberger said in an interview shortly after his heroic actions saved the lives of everyone aboard Flight 1549 that he tried, throughout his flying career, to make small deposits each day into his memory bank, knowing that one day he would "have to make a massive withdrawal."

It was a sound strategy, Graham said, because doing so enabled Sullenberger to make instantaneous, life-and-death decisions on that fateful day. It's a lesson especially adaptable to the public-safety sector, whose personnel make such decisions on a daily basis.

"You will run into the unthinkable event someday, and you will have to make instantaneous decisions," Graham said. "Whether you are prepared to do so is up to you."

To prepare, Jones recommended that 911 emergency call centers at least implement protocols that every telecommunicator follows for every call the center receives. He suggested that centers adopt the protocols already established by the National Academies of Emergency Dispatch, the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) Institute or PowerPhone (a provider of crisis communications training), and resist the temptation to create their own.

"That's dangerous, because a local agency doesn't have the expertise," said Jones, who further cautioned that centers also should resist altering the national protocols, because "sometimes they over-modify them."

Emergency call center managers also can play an important role in reducing the stress encountered by 911 call-takers and dispatchers, according to Steve Wisely, director of APCO's Communications Center and 911 services department. He said managers should be trained to have a calming effect on telecommunicators. "It's important that the supervisory leadership has training that will allow them to act in a calm manner, even when high-profile incidents are underway," Wisely said. "The supervisors set the tone for the workers that are reporting to them."

It's also important that supervisors recognize when a call-taker or dispatcher needs to decompress or a shoulder to lean on for a few minutes, Wisely said. "A support system needs to be in place where a person can get out of their seat and go to a quiet place to contemplate [an incident] or talk to somebody, if they're troubled by it," he said.

http://urgentcomm.com/policy_and_law/mag/sops-training-reduce-call-takers-stress-200907/index.html?smte=wl

from Urgent Communications

I posted a synopsis of his speech late last week. I just came across this article. The author of the artice is so right! If you ever get the opportunity to hear Gordon Graham speak, do so!


Risk management is a laughing matter
Jun 9, 2009 11:04 AM, By Glenn Bischoff

FORT WORTH, Texas — Who doesn't like a "two-fer?" Whether it's a buy-one-get-one deal at the grocery store or a baseball doubleheader, more generally is viewed as better. Yesterday, at the National Emergency Number Association conference, attendees were treated to a unique two-fer, a keynote address that doubled as a stand-up comedy routine.

Gordon Graham was the speaker. His career is a two-fer: he started his professional life as a California Highway Patrol officer, rising through the ranks to captain before his retirement; later he became a successful attorney and educator. In 30 years of attending keynote addresses — the list includes such entertaining and/or inspiring speakers such as Mike Ditka, Bo Schembechler and Adrian Cronauer (whose exploits inspired the cult-classic movie "Good Morning, Vietnam") — Graham's stands alone. I'm not the only one who thought so. Throughout the day, I overheard similar comments. Indeed, Graham himself is a two-fer — someone who delivers a relevant, on-point message in a completely hilarious fashion.

His topic was risk management, and his message was remarkably simple: nearly every bad outcome is predictable and thus preventable. He used several historical examples to illustrate the point. The one I found most interesting was the most recent. He showed a copy of yesterday's USA Today, which reported that nearly every "serious" regional airline accident over the past 10 years involved at least one pilot who had previously failed a proficiency test. According to Graham, each of these incidents was predictable and preventable. "If your pilot can't pass the test, then maybe he shouldn't fly the plane," he said.

In contrast, Graham then presented US Airways Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, who landed his airplane in New York City's Hudson River in January after several birds flew into the craft's engines, rending them inoperable. Sullenberger is a shining example of one of Graham's seven rules of risk management: training has to be constant and rigorous. "Every day needs to be a training day," Graham said.

He spoke of something that Sullenberger said in an interview shortly after his heroic actions saved the lives of everyone aboard Flight 1549. Sullenberger said that he tried, throughout his flying career, to make small deposits each day into his memory bank, knowing that one day he would "have to make a massive withdrawal," Graham said. It was a sound strategy, Graham said, because doing so enabled him to make instantaneous, life-and-death decisions on that fateful day. It's a lesson especially adaptable to the public-safety sector, whose personnel make such decisions on a daily basis.

"You will run into the unthinkable event someday, and you will have to make instantaneous decisions," Graham said. "Whether you are prepared to do so is up to you."

His other rules of risk management included the following:


Organizations must strive for continuous improvement in their personnel;
Organizations must hire quality people — "If you hire stupid people, they are not going to get better over time," Graham said;
An organization's supervisors must spot problems before they become tragedies;
An organization and its members must have a healthy respect for the dangers and risks they face;
An organization must establish performance metrics for its personnel and hold them accountable — "Rules without enforcement are just nice words," Graham said;
An organization and its personnel must be able and willing to learn from their mistakes.

Concerning the final rule, Graham told the story of a woman he encountered while a member of the California Highway Patrol. The woman lived near Malibu, Calif. On three separate occasions, each roughly a decade apart, wildfire destroyed the woman's home, which she promptly rebuilt on the same spot each time.

During the most recent wildfire, Graham said he received numerous e-mails from people who had attended one of his lectures at some point over the years and were now concerned that he might be in danger. The e-mails, which came from all over the country, were so numerous that Graham eventually was forced to craft a blanket response, which he wrote firm in the knowledge that "California catches on fire every year." It read, "Risk management is not a class I teach; it's a way of life. Do you really think I'd build my [freaking] house in the [freaking] woods?" Predictable and preventable.

If you ever have a chance to take in one of Graham's lectures, I urge you to do so. I guarantee you will learn something — and will be thoroughly entertained in the process.

Seven Rules of Admiral Rickover by Gordon Graham

NENA

Continued Professional Training

June 8, 2009

SPEAKER: Gordon Graham

AFFAIRS OF PUBLIC SAFETY 2009:

“Seven Rules of Admiral Rickover”

Thanks for inviting me back to Texas to speak to you regarding your job as a representative of the telecommunications community. It is an absolute honor to be with you here today. My hat is off to you for all you do – and I recognize the key role you play in being the first point of contact between citizens in need and the public safety community. I may have met some of you in prior presentations, and if that is true you know my focus in life is in the Management of Risk.

There are all sorts of applications of the discipline of risk management. My goal is over the next two hours is to give you some ideas, strategies, tactics and thoughts on what you can do to better protect yourself, your team, your public, your organization, and your noble profession. Also, I would love to see you smile just a bit also. Let’s get started.

One of the great icons of the 20th Century was Admiral Hyman Rickover. He is know as the “father” of our nuclear navy and his efforts have made America safer. Born in Warsaw in 1900, Rickover rose to rank of Admiral and directed the development of our nuclear navy, which has a tremendous safety record. He recognized he was dealing with a highly risky, highly complex issue, and he developed rules for success.

How can these rules help you in your highly complex, highly risky world of telecommunications operations? How did his focus on quality control penetrate the organization so deeply so as to reach to the line employee level in the nuclear navy? Let’s take a look at each of these rules and explore the possibilities.

Rule 1. You must have a rising standard of quality over time, and well beyond what is required by any minimum standard.

We have to get better and better at what we do. Our public deserves it. Our personnel deserve it. We must be constantly looking for a better way to do things. Status Quo – we have always done it this way – is not longer acceptable.

On an organizational level, there are better ways to get and keep good people. There are better ways to build your policy manual. There are better ways to train your personnel. There are better ways to supervise. There are better ways to discipline errant employees.

On an operational level, we must improve our performance in response times, quality and timeliness of written reports, training, candor in performance evaluations, equipment andvehicle maintenance, physical conditioning, and anything else that we can measure.

Continuous improvement has got to be part of the way we do business.

Rule 2. People running complex systems should be highly capable.

Successful public safety operations require people who know how to think. Fifty years ago, you did not need to be all that sharp to be in public safety.

Things have changed. Technology, equipment, strategies and tactics involved in providing services to our constituents have all changed. This is an extremely complex job, and if you hire people who can’t think things through, you are in route to disaster.

If you allow the hiring of idiots, they will not disappoint you – they will always be idiots. In view of the consequences that can occur when things do not go right in your complex, high-risk job – this may end being the cause of a future tragedy.

Every nickel you spend in weeding out losers up front has the potential to save you amillion dollars. And I can prove that statement if you want me to.

Rule 3. Supervisors have to face bad news when it comes, and takeproblems to a level high enough to fix those problems.

When you take an honest look at tragedies in any aspect of public safety, from the lawsuits to the injuries, deaths, embarrassments, internal investigations and even the rare criminal filing, so many of them get down to supervisors not behaving like supervisors.The primary mission of a supervisor is “systems implementation”.

If you promote people who either can’t or won’t enforce policy, you are in route to tragedy. To be sure, the transition from line employee to supervisor is a difficult one, but the people you choose to be supervisors have to like their people so much, that they will enforce the policy to protect each of them from harm or loss.

Not to beat this point to death, but you show me a tragedy in public safety operations –including some in the news today – and I will show you the fingerprints of a supervisor not behaving like a supervisor.

And for those of you who have promoted, remember that every day families are entrusting you with the safety of their loved ones. This is a huge responsibility.

Rule 4. You must have a healthy respect for the dangers and risks ofyour particular job.

Many public safety jobs are high risk in nature, and the consequences for not doing things right can be dramatic. Remember the basic rules of Risk Management. RPM –Recognize, Prioritize, Mobilize.

You must do a risk assessment on each job in every public safety department and identify the tasks that have the highest probability of causing you grief. Then you must prioritize these tasks in terms of potential frequency, severity and available time to think prior to acting. Finally, you must mobilize (act) to address the recognized risks appropriately and prevent consequences.

Rule 5. Training must be constant and rigorous.

Every day must be a training day! We must focus the training on the tasks in every job description that have the highest probability of causing us grief. These are the High Risk, Low Frequency, Non Discretionary time events. We must assure that all personnel are adequately trained to address the tasks that give them no time to think, and that they understand the value of thinking things through when time allows.

Rule 6. All the functions of repair, quality control and technicalsupport must fit together.

Audits and inspections are an important part of your job as a leader in public safety. We cannot assume that all is going well. We must have control measures in place to assurethings are being done right. This is not micro-management – It is called doing your job.

If you do not have the audits (formal and informal) in place, you will not know aboutproblems until they become consequences, and then you are in the domain of lawyers.That is too late for action, as all you can do then is address the consequences.

And if you take the time to study the life of Admiral Rickover, you will quickly learn thathe was widely despised in the Navy because of his insistence on using the audit processas a tool to hold people accountable.

Rule 7. The organization and members thereof must have the abilityand willingness to learn from mistakes of the past.

Analysis of past data is the foundation for almost all of risk management. We (public safety operations) keep on making the same mistakes over and over again.

As I read the lawsuits, injuries and deaths, organizational embarrassments, internal investigations and even the rare criminal filing against our personnel I know that we can learn so much by studying the mistakes we have made in the past. It all gets down to Risk Management.

Here are three statements that have guided me through most of my adult life. First is a quote, albeit paraphrased, from the great risk management guru of the 40’s, Archand Zeller.

“The Human does not change. During the period of recorded history, there is little evidence to indicate that man has changed in any major respect. Because the man does not change, the kinds oferrors he commits remain constant. The errors that he will make can be predicted from the errors he has made.”

What does this mean? We have not figured out any new ways to screw things up. We are making the same mistakes over and over again. Refineries have not figured out any new ways to blow up. Police have not figured out any new ways to get in trouble. Restaurants have not figured out any new ways to kill people. Planes have not figured outany new ways to crash. Fire Departments and firefighters have not figured out any new ways to get in trouble.

And Telecommunications personnel have not figured out any new ways to get in trouble. Please do not give me that nonsense that “bad things just happen”. I am sick of hearing that faulty “poor me” refrain. There are no new ways to get in trouble. To be sure, there are variations on a theme, but in reality it is the same stuff over and over again. Let me jump ahead in the lecture.

IDENTIFIABLE RISKS ARE MANAGEABLE RISKS

By the end of our brief time together today, I want you to fully understand that you, regardless of what your job is, are in a great position to do something about all of this right now.

The second statement important in my life thus far came from my mentor, professor and friend Chaytor Mason. He was a risk management guru in the 70’s. Here is a capsulized version of his response when I accused him of being the smartest person who ever lived.

“The smartest person in the world is the woman or man who finds the fifteenth way to hold two pieces of paper together.”

My instant response when I first heard this was confusion, but then I figured it out.While there are no new ways to screw things up (Zeller) there are always new ways to fine tune and revisit our existing systems. We must be looking for new and improved ways of doing this most complex job, and you are the ones who can do that. There are better ways to hire telecomm personnel, and there are better ways to train them. There are better ways of doing performance evaluations, and there are better ways to do the things we are tasked with doing.

Status quo (we have always done it that way – we have never done it that way) does not work. There is a better way of doing business, the 15th way, and we must constantly be looking for it. My third belief in life is a summary of the above two thoughts.

“Things that go wrong in life are predictable and predictable is preventable.”

Thanks for your patience. I have been using this line since 1980 and I appreciate your indulgence. Want proof? Take a look at your newspaper today. These handouts were finalized on May 14. And every May it starts to warm up and people get in boats for an early start for the summer and they don’t know how to operate the boat safely and they overturn it and some will drown. And every year the US Coast Guard tells us that 800 or so people drown and 90% have got PFD’s on their boat – and 90% aren’t wearing this device. Already this year we have seen this occur with the NFL guys in Florida.

And now we are in June and later this month we will have the kids dying on the way home from their Prom – alcohol and high speed will be the cause. And in July it will be more kids dying in hot cars. And in August it will be the kids dying from dehydration during football practice and in September California will burn down again – as it does every year in September. It goes on and on, but…

IT IS ALL PREDICTABLE AND PREVENTABLE!

It was an honor to address you today. I hope you leave with an enhanced vision of the value of risk management. And I hope our discussion today will give you something you can do when you get back to work to improve your specific NENA operations. Finally, please keep our soldiers and sailors in your prayers. Without them, we would be in one heck of a fix right now. I look forward tos eeing you again soon. In the interim, if you need anything, please do not hesitate to contact me anytime.

Gordon Graham

Link: http://www.nena.org/sites/default/files/Rickover%20NENA.pdf

National certification program for 911 telecommunicators is long overdue

Great article! Thank you, Glenn, for sharing our story. Thank you, Craig Whittington for introducing us to Glenn. You, dear Craig, are going to be an absolutely fantastic NENA president especially if you accomplish all you've set out to do. It's clear your family loves you, and your NENA family loves you. God bless you with guidance and strength through your journey as president. And again, thank you for helping us.

Before you all read the article there are some very minor errors regarding Denise's call. (Admittedly it is a complicated story). She did get a hold of her abductor's cell phone and kept the call taker on the line or 7 minutes giving as much information as she could. That call was handled very professionally and our hats off to the call taker who had to take that call. It must have been an emotionally difficult call. God bless you. The call that was not aired went to a different comm center. The eyewitness had that particular call taker on the line for 9 minutes giving cross streets. That call taker in a neighboring county failed to enter the information immediately and they failed to dispatch a car and worse never let the neighboring agencies know about the call. It's very glaring when listening to the 9-1-1 calls how different the counties are as far as standards. And Mr Graham is absolutely correct that supervisors need to be held accountable.

In any case, thank you for telling our story. Hopefully the 9-1-1 industry can learn from this debacle and minimize some of these errors by insisting on having our very first line of defense (call takers) become certified and make them live up to a set of standards.

National certification program for 911 telecommunicators is long overdue

Jun 11, 2009 1:59 PM, By Glenn Bischoff


http://urgentcomm.com/policy_and_law/commentary/national-certification-911-telecommunicators-20090611/

FORT WORTH, Texas — In his keynote address earlier this week at the National Emergency Number Association conference, Gordon Graham, the erstwhile motorcycle cop turned litigator/educator, spent much of the hour talking about the value of ongoing rigorous training, performance metrics and accountability as risk-management tactics. He bemoaned the lack of core-competency tests in the 911 emergency communications sector.

"Once you are hired, you will never have to take another test, if you don't want to be promoted. The public deserves better," Graham said.

Regarding those promotions, Graham also spoke of the need for supervisors to do the jobs for which they were hired.

"On every public-safety tragedy, I guarantee that you will find the fingerprints of supervisors who didn't act like a supervisor," he said. "Too many supervisors can't make the transition from buddy to boss. This is a problem lying in wait. You have to promote people who have the guts to supervise."

Graham's message was music to the ears of Craig Whittington, NENA's newly elected president, who spent six years on the organization's educational committee before joining its executive board in 2007. He told me shortly after Graham's speech that he would like to see a national certification program for 911 call-takers and dispatchers.

"You have to be certified to operate a tanning booth, but for 911 — the most critical link in emergency response — there is no certification," Whittington said.

The family and friends of Denise Amber Lee couldn't agree more with that sentiment. The 21-year-old Lee was abducted from her Florida home in January 2008, then brutally raped, killed and buried in a shallow grave by her assailant. She was found two days after her abduction. Lee's family and friends believe she might be alive today had the system — and those who work in it — performed better on the day of her abduction and have created a foundation in her name that champions 911-sector reform.

The first 911 call on that day was reportedly placed by Lee's husband Nathan, who had returned to the family's home in mid-afternoon to discover his wife missing and his two young sons — ages 2 and 6 months at the time — together in the baby's crib. The 911 center that took the call promptly reportedly issued a "be on the lookout" alert, or BOLO, which the family alleges was missed inexplicably by the 911 center in an adjacent county. At some point during the ordeal, the assailant drove through that county with Denise Lee in tow.

Later in the afternoon, a witness reportedly called 911 to report that a child in the back seat of a green Camaro was pounding on the window and screaming hysterically. The "child" was Denise Lee. According to Lee's family, that call was received by the 911 center that allegedly missed the first BOLO. Somehow, her family alleges, no BOLO ever was issued for the call from the eye witness.

Denise Lee's father works in that county as a police detective. He said in an interview on a network television newsmagazine that he was told by one fellow officer that the officer was certain the vehicle drove "right by him" but he had no idea that he should pursue because "he never received the information."

Reportedly, the county's sheriff defended the performance of the 911 center's call-takers and dispatchers that night, but he acknowledged that mistakes were made. Two dispatchers were suspended as a result of this incident.

During the ordeal, Denise Lee somehow managed to get her hands on the assailant's wireless phone without him knowing. She placed a call to 911 and cleverly gave the call-taker vital information, such as the type of car and its location — down to the cross streets — by speaking in a way that made her assailant think she was talking to him. After 7 to 9 minutes — reports vary — the assailant caught on and the call ended. Somehow, the crucial information provided by Denise Lee never made it to officers in the field, according to her family. And, her location couldn't be identified by the 911 system because she used a pre-paid wireless phone to place the call.

Steve Largent, the former congressman from Oklahoma and member of the Professional Football Hall of Fame, spoke during the NENA conference in his current role of CTIA president and CEO. He told of one particular tactic used by his Seattle Seahawks coach Chuck Knox, who was the first to regularly practice the plays the team would use at the end of games when they desperately needed to score. Today, every team does this, but in Largent's playing days, the practice was considered cutting-edge. According to Largent, the tactic was quite effective, because the players knew just what to do at the most stressful, frenetic juncture of the game.

Before telling the Knox story, Largent said something that well could be applied to the Lee tragedy. "You [911 call-takers and dispatchers] are a phone call people hope they never have to make. They count on you. You have to have a game plan in place and know what play to call."

There are few jobs as stressful as that of 911 call-taker/dispatcher. No one outside of that world can empathize with what these dedicated professionals encounter on a daily basis. When journalists make mistakes, publications run corrections. When 911 telecommunicators make mistakes, people die. Undeniably, it's a tough job — which is all the more reason for them to be at the top of their game.

The Denise Amber Lee Foundation is lobbying for the creation of a national certification program for 911 call-takers and dispatchers. "We want to ensure that no other family has to endure the pure hell our family has experienced," Nathan Lee said this week at the NENA conference.

It seems like a reasonable request.