Dispatcher call response time is running well below the national average despite the ongoing challenge of reaching full staffing at Lake County’s consolidated dispatch.
Brian Hitchcock, outgoing E-911 director, said Thursday before the Lake County Public Safety Communications Commission that the national average time for a call to be answered by a 911 dispatcher from the time the call is placed is 10 seconds.
“It looks like we are still running a three-second response time,” Hitchcock said, adding the actual figure is lower than three seconds but not low enough to call it two seconds.
Through the first part of the year, the county’s consolidated dispatch operation was processing about 400,000 calls a month. Average call volume for the summer months has been hovering around 500,000, he said.
The workload is being handled by the department’s 71 full-time dispatchers and its field of part-timers. Optimal staffing level is 95, though the department has yet to run at full staff since all the units were brought under one roof.
Hitchcock said training is ongoing to fill the positions, but there is a lag from the time a person is hired and the time they are ready to go on the floor. Nine people are in training, with one ready to be released for full-time duty and another ready in two weeks. Twenty additional full-time prospects will go through testing Tuesday that will feature a newly added personality component of the test.
The new component looks at an individual’s ability to work in a team environment. Existing testing covers competency areas like multitasking and the ability to read maps, as well a psychological stress component. Hitchcock said what supervisors were finding with some new hires is that while the individual passed all those tests, they were unable to work well with others once trained and placed on the floor.
So far the new test appears to be helping identify potential candidates who would work well in team situations.
“We had a couple who looked pretty good and a couple who looked pretty scary,” Hitchcock said of some of the testing results.
He would like to see eight more candidates hired out of the current pool of applicants. Last month, the Lake County Council approved raising the pay scale for existing and new full-time dispatchers in an effort to slow turnaround, encourage better candidates and improve morale of existing dispatchers.
Commissioner Michael Repay, D-Hammond, chairman of the E-911 commission, said council members understood the need and ultimately unanimously supported the move to increase pay.
Repay said he is also taking the time to send memos to the dispatchers expressing the board’s gratitude for their hard work.
“I want them to know, hey, we understand what you are going through. We want to be helpful to you and your employment here,” Repay said.
Carrie Napoleon is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
