INDUSTRY NEWS
This article can be found on
page 4 of the Mar/Apr 1998
issue of 9-1-1 Magazine.
Sensitive Issue
A recent Internet discussion about dispatcher stress sparked a great deal of commentary. After taking two very difficult calls in two days, a telecommunicator in one Midwest PSAP went home crying. Two other dispatchers ridiculed her for her sensitivity, claiming that "if you are that sensitive, you shouldn't work for 9-1-1." They felt they should adopt the attitude that "you just do your best job and beyond that you don't care, otherwise the job will destroy you."
The message was posted on an Internet mailing list for 9-1-1 managers and dispatchers with the note: "For the employee who went home crying, she is in a lot of pain because of the issues she's had to deal with. The other employees, on the other hand, feel no pain at all and in the process seem to have lost something that makes them human."
The posting generated a fair amount of response, some of it in favor of the other employees - agreeing that oversensitivity is inappropriate to a job such as 9-1-1 dispatcher. Objectivity and desensitization are requirements to handle the job and emotional responses such as crying are inappropriate. Other dispatchers felt that emotional reactions are natural for caring people and that peer counseling for the first dispatcher and stress training for the other two was appropriate.
My own take on this issue is that, while dispatchers - like cops and firefighters and paramedics and rescue specialists - have to maintain a degree of impartiality to effectively do their jobs, giving up all sensitivity to a caller's situation or a co-worker's reaction to it compromises the kind of caring, helping attitude that got most of us into this line of work. Hardness of heart is detrimental to good public safety service.
No one is supposed to check their emotions or their heart at the door when they accept a dispatch position. The dispatchers who ridiculed this woman have done both her and their own profession a profound disfavor. Just because they may not react that way to calls, that doesn't mean she doesn't have the right to grieve or be affected by them. Different people may react to the same situation differently, based on their background, environment, and state of mind. Many of us with kids react with strong emotions to incidents involving children. Others may not, but something else may affect them. None of us should judge someone else's reactions based on our own.
Just as some firefighters, cops, and paramedics will react differently to certain circumstances, so will dispatchers Those two dispatchers are urgently in need of retraining if that's the kind of treatment they give a co-worker. What kind of sensitivity do they give their callers? Critical Incident Stress Management is rapidly becoming recognized as a critical component of communication center management and employee well-being. By scorning this dispatcher they've likely only made matters worse for her and made her recovery and ability to function proficiently that much harder.
