Take emergency calls and dispatch resources on a supervised shift

What is going on

You are on the afternoon shift with the senior dispatcher for your supervised call taking and dispatch. The shift starts with recorded training calls, then you take live calls transferred from the national emergency call service with your supervisor listening in. Console 4 is offline with a headset fault, so you are on console 2. During the shift you will receive a report of a grass fire on a rural road with an unclear location, an automatic fire alarm from an aged care facility, a call from a distressed caller reporting a person trapped in a crashed car, and a request for assistance for a tree on a house. Every incident must be created in the computer aided dispatch system with the right type so the pre-determined response is generated, and the status times must be recorded.

Your brief

Answer and process each call to the protocol, confirm locations, create incidents with the correct type, dispatch the nearest available appropriate resources, control the radio channel, record every status time in the Incident and Dispatch Log, and escalate correctly, while looking after your own welfare after a distressing call.

Work through it

You do not need to do it all. Doing a few of these will show you what the work is like. Your ticks and notes stay on this device.

• Read the Emergency Call Taking and Dispatch Procedure and list the call taking sequence, the location confirmation rules, the automatic fire alarm rule and the escalation triggers.
• Complete the console start check with your supervisor, confirm console 2 audio and radio, and note the console 4 hazard in the Health and Safety Incident Register.
• Take the grass fire call: confirm the location using read back, mapping and cross roads or landmarks, create the incident with the correct type and dispatch the pre-determined response.
• Process the automatic fire alarm from the aged care facility by dispatching the pre-determined response immediately and then contacting the premises for information to pass to the crews.
• Take the road crash call: keep the caller calm, confirm location and the number of people trapped, give pre-arrival advice from the protocol, create the incident and dispatch rescue and pumper resources.
• Take the storm request for assistance, create it as a request in the log with the correct priority and pass it to the SES duty officer.
• Control the radio for the road crash incident: acknowledge every message, record the on scene, under control and stop times, and relay the request for police traffic control.
• Ask your supervisor for a break after the road crash call, record that peer support was offered, and complete a shift summary listing each incident and any errors you caught.

What someone in this role would produce

• Incident and Dispatch Log entries for the four incidents with status times
• A call taking checklist showing the sequence followed for each call
• A radio log for the road crash incident
• A shift summary with welfare actions recorded