WESTFIELD – The the police commission moved the city’s new and enhanced emergency medical dispatch center a step closer to becoming operational Monday night when it appointed four new dispatchers who will be part of the team when the facility becomes operational on July 1.
The stage was set for the appointment of the new dispatchers – Lizbeth Scholpp, Kate Simmons, Jill Koziol, and Tiffany Ramos – in April, when the City Council appropriated $42,234 for the police department to fund four new emergency dispatch positions and a supervisor to staff the new dispatch center.
The dispatch center committee, which has been developing the proposal for the new communications center and which includes Police John Camerota, Fire Chief Mary Regan and the city’s technology director, Lenore Bernashe, interviewed Police Commission.
The same committee is working to recommend a supervisor for the Public Safety Communications Center to be located at the city’s Technology Department at Barnes Regional Airport, which already houses the city’s Emergency Management Agency.
The center will become part of a Public Safety Communications Department, which was created by City Council action in March and will be activated at the start of the new fiscal year on July 1. The new department will have its own budget for salaries, equipment, capital improvement and maintenance.
It will be overseen by a commission comprised of the police and fire chiefs, the technology director and two representatives appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the City Council.
On July 1, the newly hired dispatchers, and the current civilian police dispatchers, will become part of the new department.
The emergency communications facility is a radical departure from the existing protocols for dispatching emergency personnel and reflects modern trends in efficiency for the increasingly complex task.
Currently, separate dispatch operations in the city’s police and fire departments route police, firefighters and emergency medical personnel to emergency situations, but state mandates are changing the way that those duties are handled, particularly in terms of emergency medical dispatching.
Beginning in July, all emergency response dispatchers (EMD) in the Commonwealth will be required to be certified as emergency medical dispatchers and, when handling a medical emergency call, will stay on the phone line with persons reporting an emergency to give them guidance as they wait for an ambulance to arrive. This effectively means that all dispatchers answering 911 calls must be EMD certified.
Currently, the police department’s six civilian dispatchers are largely qualified to meet the new mandate but those personnel only cover the day and evening shifts while police officers staff the dispatch desk during the overnight shift.
At the fire department, the dispatch duties are handled by firefighters.
The city will see considerable savings – currently estimated at $1.3 million over three years – both by consolidating the dispatch desks at the two departments and because the civilian dispatchers will earn considerably less than qualified police officers or firefighters.
And, by using only civilian dispatchers, no police officers will have to be trained to qualify as emergency medical dispatchers.
Additional savings will also be realized because the personnel who will no longer be needed to serve as dispatchers will be available to serve elsewhere, effectively increasing the manpower available at both departments.
Firefighters currently assigned to dispatch duties will be assigned to line fire companies, while the police officers used as dispatchers on the overnight shift will be available for patrol duties.
Savings will also be realized by avoiding the need to replace the current dispatching equipment at the Fire Department. Fire Chief Mary Regan has said that the equipment there is so old and obsolete that it is beyond repair and would have to be completely replaced to remain operational.
Police Captain Hipolito (Paul) Nunez, who has been closely involved in the plans for the new dispatch center, said that the newly hired dispatchers will start work on Monday, May 21, and will complete a variety of training before they are put to work.
Nunez said that they will have to take a 40 hour training program offered by a national training company at a facility in Maynard to learn “the basic foundation of dispatching” and will then come back to the department for additional training.
The will be required to complete the first responder and CPR training required of all police officers as well as training in the E911 protocols.
They will then have to undergo a three-day course for emergency medical dispatch training in Taunton before they return to the department to learn the details of the software and hardware they will be using.
Nunez said that most of the training costs will be paid by a grant the department has already received which will expire in July.
He said that the nationwide trend is to establish limited numbers of regional dispatch centers because of the increasing cost of the technology needed to operate them but stressed that the real benefit of a regional dispatch center is “the higher quality of dispatching personnel” involved with such a facility.
“Dispatching has become a profession that is complex” he said. “The benefit to the community is having dispatchers who are professionals in that particular field.”
Also, Nunez said, by establishing its own up-to-date dispatch center, the city will be well positioned to recoup some of its costs by taking on dispatcher duties for other area communities.
He said that, because the high cost of the equipment needed for a modern dispatch facility is borne by the state, state officials are leaning toward requiring a limited number of dispatch centers which will each service several cities or towns.
City Councilor James E. Brown Jr., the chair of the council’s Legislative and Ordinance Committee, has said that representatives of at least two other communities are currently discussing the possibility of Westfield dispatchers taking over the emergency dispatching duties for their communities.
