Austin is facing pressure from its residents to resolve the issue of understaffing at the Texas capital’s massively understaffed 911 dispatch centres which have left callers on the line for extended periods of time in the midst of deadly emergencies.
Tanya Gotcher is one such person who recently experienced this nightmarish situation as her husband died of a heart attack while she was left on hold by 911 dispatchers for 15 minutes. Her story is now being featured in a campaign ad for Travis County judge candidate Rupal Chaudhari.
“When you hear the phone ring for 15 minutes, and you can’t get to anybody to help you, is the worst nightmare that you could have,” Ms Gotcher said in an interview with KEYE-TV recently.
Though it’s been months since her husband of 30 years passed away, she says that the wound still feels fresh, particularly when her calls for help were met on that day in May seemed to go unanswered for several minutes.
While waiting for a dispatcher to pick up, she says she attempted CPR on her collapsed husband, Casey. She even tapped her father-in-law, who lived in a different county, to attempt to tag team the situation by placing a call to the emergency service separately.
Those efforts, too, would prove fruitless.
“It took him 10 minutes, and then the 911 company realised he was in a different county, so they transferred him, and it took another three minutes,” Ms Gotcher said. Hers, she says, “was a minimum of 15 if not 20 minutes.”
Ms Gotcher’s story is hardly the first from the Austin region to break through the airwaves in recent months about inappropriately long wait times to reach a 911 dispatcher as the city continues to try to fill the nearly half of operator positions in the call centre that are vacant.
Recent figures from the city’s Human Resources Department (HRD) point out that two out of three calls (64 per cent) are answered within 15 seconds, which is markedly below the national standard of 90 per cent of calls being answered by emergency dispatchers within that time frame.
The average for 38,000 people making emergency calls in the city of Austin for the month of October, according to Fox News Digital, was a wait time of two and a half minutes.
As of 10 October, the HRD reported there remained 49 vacancies out of 105 positions for 911 call takers and 21 vacancies for police dispatchers out of a total of 75 positions.
The city council held a meeting this week where they released the latest findings in their efforts to entice more people to apply for these difficult to fill positions and noted that there has been a steady increase in applicants for both roles, which can in part be attributed to wage increases and changes to create a better work-life balance.
“The best way to reduce call wait times is to get more operators to answer calls,” said Austin City Manager Spencer Cronk in a statement from Tuesday’s meeting. “I want to reassure the community that retaining and recruiting more operators and dispatchers for our emergency call center is a top priority.”
Some of the efforts that the city has undertaken in recent months include increasing the entry pay for 911 call takers, which they’re upping by 26 per cent – or rather $22.85 per hour – and the entry pay for police dispatchers to $24.42 per hour.
Other initiatives that Austin Police Chief Joseph Chacon said at the meeting that they’re doing to address staffing shortages and wait times is to focus on retention as well as recruitment. To achieve that, they have reduced mandatory overtime and are also offering optional overtime for employees to come in on their days off.
Part of the problem in addressing the current strain on the system, the city conceded, was the long leadup time that it takes to get staff trained and certified for the specific jobs they’re taking on.
“Part of the reason vacancy rates remain stubbornly high is the length of time it takes to hire a 911 Call Taker or Dispatcher and get them fully trained – currently several months,” the news release read, noting that there are also “significant requirements that must be met”, such as background checks and a psychological evaluation, that can slow down onboarding.
In the meantime, the city asks that residents using 911 be aware that they could be placed on hold and not hang up if their call isn’t answered immediately.
“Hanging up will delay the ability of a 911 Call Taker to answer an emergency call,” the city said in a news release from this week. “Second, callers should try to remain calm and be prepared to provide their name, location, and nature of the emergency.”
