In the wake of continuing personnel and technology problems at New York City’s emergency comm center, a leaked memo reveals that city leaders are considering mandatory 16-hour shifts for dispatchers, no weekends off for senior dispatchers, and the assignment of police officers to the center to increase staffing. City officials acknowledge the memo, but say the changes were the result of a “brainstorming exercise,” and no final decisions have been made. Comm center operations have been implicated in several high-profile response delays, including to a fatal vehicle accident in which a 4 year-old girl died. The center’s ICAD dispatching software system has suffered several outages that required manual incident handling, including earlier this week. Union officials claim that 20 to 30 dispatchers are resigning each month because of the stress of the job and forced overtime. Read more about the staffing and technology situation in the NY Daily News.
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I DON’T think 16 hr shifts mandatory and no weekends off for senior staff is going to solve the problem. In fact, it may boost the problem into overdrive. Or another thought is, maybe they are trying to push out the senior telecommunciators and hiring a younger staff to cover the shifts since there seems to be an issue with the current staff. Instead of looking into the CAD’s continuous problems and holding the company at fault, let’s make it even harder for the staff!! WRONG move I think. That’s not a ‘brainstorming exercise’, that’s a brainstorming disaster.
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