A dangerous Washington 911 staffing crisis was averted with a simple fix: remote work

11 Feb A dangerous Washington 911 staffing crisis was averted with a simple fix: remote work

When residents of Kitsap County, Washington, call 911, they may never know that the person picking up may be located on the other side of the country. That’s the whole point.

Kitsap’s first-in-the-nation implementation of a remote 911 dispatch system shows that workplace flexibility and critical, real-time response can go together. And it could offer a model for 911 systems across America, which face an ongoing staffing crisis: Between 2019 and 2022, one in four jobs at 911 centers were vacant, according to a 2023 report published by the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch and the National Association of State 911 Administrators.

Kitsap County, a watery peninsula that lies across Puget Sound from Seattle, presents “a lot of interesting geographical challenges to emergency services,” says Brandon Wecker, the technology services manager at Kitsap 911, which dispatches police, fire, and emergency medical responders—plus animal control and coroner’s office representatives—across 566 square miles. The district encompasses the city of Bremerton (home to the third-largest Navy base in the U.S.), the 24,000-odd people living eco-friendly lives on Bainbridge Island, and areas that are even more remote and rural. All of this territory is connected by bridges and ferries. And with 250 miles of saltwater coastline, says Wecker. “We have a wide variety of emergencies.” In 2022, Kitsap 911 dispatched first responders to more than 244,000 “events.”

Typically, at any given time, about a dozen people—from a total agency staff of about 60—work at multiscreen dispatch consoles at the organization’s headquarters. But COVID took a toll on staffing—last year, Kitsap 911 had 13 open positions—and overtime hours in the high-stress job were racking up. During the pandemic, Kitsap 911 had developed a variety of backup plans in case a large number of employees got sick at the same time. These plans included training the tech department to handle 911 calls, and setting up a “quarantine room,” where dispatchers who had been exposed but were not too sick to come in, could work their shift. That evolved into a mobile command post, which was initially set up in an RV borrowed from the Sheriff’s office. (Kitsap 911 now has a custom trailer, with its own bathroom, which serves as a mobile dispatch center.)

But the leadership team also prototyped a version of the work consoles that could be set up in dispatchers’ homes. Initially, says Wecker, “it was a matter of grabbing some laptops, and seeing, can we get the dispatching software to work through a remote connection? Can we install our radio and phone software, and just see if this works?”

Kitsap 911—the first U.S. 911 center to operationalize remote dispatching and call taking—uses computer-aided dispatching (CAD) software made by Stockholm-based multinational Hexagon, which also counts as clients the law enforcement agencies in Washington D.C., Toronto, and London. For several years, the company had been working on upgrades to its CAD product to make it cloud compliant, says Bill Campbell, a senior vice president of Hexagon’s safety, infrastructure & geospatial division in North America. “The technology and the capability for remote dispatching was there. But an event—in this case, COVID—accelerated the acceptance of it.” Says Wecker: “Getting their CAD to run in our remote setup was one of the easier tasks of the whole system setup. The software just worked.”

A federal CARES grant, in late 2020, provided funding to upgrade Kitsap’s jerry-rigged remote units, or “kits” and the backend infrastructure to support them. “Our technicians did significant work connecting our phone, radio, and computer-aided dispatch computer systems, getting audio paths to flow from three different remote machines into and out of one terminal at the person’s house,” says Wecker. “We worked out how many monitors they’d need. We added a foot pedal, so that they’re able to key up the radio with their foot and keep their hands on the keyboard.” A key issue is ensuring that remote locations have a reliable and secure internet connection—no lag time issues. Kitsap 911 partners with the county for its network services, which support virtual private networks, or VPNs. Because the software is running on virtual servers with their data hosted at the dispatch center, nothing sensitive is saved on anyone’s home workstation. “It’s almost like a streaming device that allows them to view what’s being posted at our center,” says Wecker. “If that machine were to walk off or get compromised, if you don’t have the logins, it has nothing on it.”

Through the CARES grant, Kitsap County was able to purchase 10 separate workstations to install in dispatchers’ homes, with four monitors each—two for Hexagon’s CAD, one for radio, and one for phone. The setup had to be self-installed during COVID, and came with a 25-page installation manual heavy on pictures. Seasoned dispatchers—and the training supervisor—tested the system. “Getting the staff on board was critical to success,” says Wecker.

With the official approval of local mayors, county commissioners, and emergency services themselves, the system went live on July 4th last year, traditionally the busiest day for 911 services in the county—think, fireworks and drunken fights over fireworks—with a few remote employees on standby, just in case.

But “the rubber hit the road” last September, says Wecker, when nine members of the operations team caught COVID and 18 others were isolating because they were close contacts. The remaining workers had to socially distance across the call center, and others began working remotely, from home. “The worst-case scenario that we thought could have happened during the pandemic happened on the tail end of the pandemic, but we had this remote stuff more dialed in and could react in a way that kept us all working.”

Today, it’s typical to have one or more people working remotely each shift. Having the option of working from home has made it easier to staff tricky shifts; people are more willing to put in a couple hours overtime when they don’t have to get into their car. And people who would otherwise be out on medical leave, but are perfectly able to work from home, can do so.

The shift to remote dispatching has also allowed Kitsap to keep employees who relocate. Conrad Shadel, a veteran dispatcher from a different county in Washington State, did four months of on-site training at Kitsap 911 in order to gain the opportunity to work remotely after that. Last year, he and his wife moved closer to family, living “in the woods” outside Raleigh, North Carolina. Shadel rents secure office space to get the internet connection he needs, and keeps in real-time contact with his colleagues back in Kitsap just as he would if he were working at headquarters—using the group messaging app. (Dispatchers are constantly texting back and forth with each other and with first responders as they’re on calls.) While he misses always “being able to put a face to the name,” he says, “in some ways, being away from the group gives me more room to breathe. I can talk to myself without being concerned about what somebody hears me say.”

Shadel believes that remote dispatching could revolutionize the 911 industry by drastically expanding the hiring pool—allowing people to live where they want to and to relocate without a months-long training period at a new center. But Campbell, at Hexagon, concedes that “there has not been a huge uptake in remote dispatching outside of Kitsap in the near term.” (Places with really dispersed populations, such as the northern reaches of the province of Alberta in Canada, are an exception.)

But broader trends—including a steadily declining number of U.S. call centers—seem to make wider adoption all but inevitable. “Public safety is not unlike other industries,” Campbell says. “Once one municipality does it, and they have success doing it, others will jump on.”

Source: Fast Company