MT. AIRY – Agencies across the state and nation are dealing with a lack of qualified public safety workers, and now Habersham County E-9-1-1 is facing a personnel shortage.
“Currently, we’re down seven positions,” said Habersham County E-9-1-1 Director Lynn Smith. “We are budgeted to have five positions per shift and we’re down to three per shift.”
Dispatchers operate on 12-hour shifts, and Smith said having vacant terminals during a shift can negatively impact timeliness of call handling.
“Anytime you’re short-staffed there’s going to be calls that are going to be longer answered,” Smith said. “Hopefully that doesn’t happen too often, but if you have a wreck and you have 15 calls coming in, obviously they can’t all be answered at one time. We try, even with overtime, to have at least four here during the busiest peak hours, which is usually noon to midnight, so we do have a fourth person here then, but that’s with overtime.”
Habersham County dispatchers provide a higher level of service to residents and visitors than many 9-1-1 centers around the state. One of those enhanced services is emergency medical dispatch (EMD), where dispatchers walk callers through emergency protocols such as CPR or bleeding control.
That means in some cases dispatchers can go to a neighboring 9-1-1 center and make more money for less work.
“We’ve done a study and we’ve got probably 60 different counties around us in the state of Georgia, and then we started pulling out by population – closer to population for us – the ones who EMD, which is really hard because there are not a lot that’s our caliber that EMD, and call volume,” Smith said. “We’re pretty far down right now, but we’re working on that with the budget and we’re hoping that if the budget gets approved it will help a little bit.”
County commissioners recently discussed a $1-per-hour raise for full-time dispatchers and a 50-cent raise for part-time personnel.
“What they’re looking at, no it won’t get us where we’re higher than anybody around us but at least it will get us in the ballpark where we will come up to where some of them are, not all of them are,” Smith said.
Asked whether $1 an hour motivates someone to apply for a position as an emergency dispatcher, Smith said, “I would hope it does. An example, we had a guy that we interviewed this morning that lives in Florida right now. We offered him the position because he was certified, and he turned it down because of the pay. And we even explained that we were looking at possibly getting an increase July 1, but to him it still was not enough.”
While every effort is made by dispatchers to ensure that no call goes unanswered, Smith said the personnel shortage inevitably will impact the public at some point.
“We hope and we strive to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks, but how can we be sure?” Smith said. “If you’ve got so many phonelines ringing and you’ve only got three or four bodies in there, something’s going to go undone – and it is going to affect the public, unfortunately. It’s going to affect our officers in the field, it’s going to affect our EMTs, our firefighters, and that’s the last thing we want to do is not be able to administer help to somebody that needs it, whether it’s public safety or the public in general. You’ve got to be able to do your job here, and so that will be a tremendous impact on the person that it happens to when it happens – God forbid it ever happens.”
Smith said the center has a variety of experience levels, but even the most experienced supervisors and senior dispatchers, or the most talented rookie dispatcher, can only handle so many calls simultaneously.
“I have one or two that have been here 20 years, I have some that have been here 10-plus years, then I have some that have been here six months, one year, two years, so it’s just a mixture,” Smith said.
Smith said she thinks the center is functioning well despite the shortage, but additional qualified applicants are needed.
Currently, vacations for dispatchers have been canceled until further notice to keep dispatch consoles manned.
“I think what we have in place right now is working,” Smith said. “It’s just a matter of us filling the seats, getting qualified people in here, getting good applicants that we can pick and choose from. The problem is we’re not getting any applicants. You can’t event attempt to try to fill the positions when you’re not getting any applicants, so we’ve got to start at the basics. We’ve got to get the applicants, then move forward. If we can do that, I think we’ll be on our way to maybe solving some of the problem.”
Several recent applicants have been convicted felons, who cannot hold the positions, and numerous others have not been able to pass the basic spelling test administered to those seeking employment.
“I just hope we can build it back up,” Smith said. “It’s a good place to work. It’s a great place to work, I feel like, and I think the ones that are here and the ones that have stayed with us through thick and thin feel the same way or they wouldn’t still be here. It’s a profession that if you get into it you don’t ever want to leave it. It’s something you enjoy.”
