SALT LAKE CITY — Some of Utah’s 911 dispatch centers are understaffed, take too long to respond to calls and hire employees that lack the necessary certifications, according to a recent legislative audit that Senate President Stuart Adams called “troubling.”
Presenting before the Legislative Audit Subcommittee on Tuesday, audit supervisor Jake Dinsdale highlighted his main concerns with the Beehive State’s 911 centers, some of which only staff one dispatcher.
Seven dispatchers in the state operate in jails, and in what he called an “extreme example,” Dinsdale told the committee how one of the centers — staffed by only one operator — was momentarily unmanned while the employee attempted to rescue an inmate attempting suicide.
While his example was indeed extreme, Dinsdale noted the widespread dangers of understaffing an emergency dispatch center.
“It’s not hard to conceive a situation where things happen and they are overwhelmed,” he said, noting the understaffed centers are mostly confined to the rural corners of the state. “If they’re already dealing with one, in the thick of it, and another call comes in, the quality of the service will suffer.”
And while the largest dispatch center in the state — the Salt Lake Valley Emergency Communications Center, or VECC — may not be as chronically understaffed as other centers, the audit revealed how thousands of calls each year fall short of the national standard.
According to Dinsdale, 95% of emergency calls should be answered within 20 seconds. In 2019, just 80% of calls that came through VECC adhered to the 20 second rule, meaning roughly 35,500 calls were not answered in accordance to the standard.
“We observed callers waiting what we felt was an excessive amount of time,” Dinsdale said. “There was about 17,500 emergency callers who waited for about a minute in that automated queue, where they’re listening to a message asking them to wait.”
Dating back to 2012 — a 60 month streak of falling below the industry norm for VECC — Adams, R-Layton, was “blown away that someone could have a perfect record, but it’s not a good perfect record.”
“If you’re having a heart attack or if you’ve got a medical emergency, 121 seconds plus is an eternity, and it may be actually a life,” he said, referring to the 3,463 calls identified in the audit that were on hold for over two minutes.
“It seems like maybe it’s OK to have lower than a 95% objective and that concerns me,” added House Speaker Brad Wilson, R-Kaysville.
Dinsdale also told lawmakers how many operators in the state lack the proper credentials — while 94% of Utah’s dispatchers have the required emergency medical dispatcher certification, only 54% have a current license, meaning the remainder cannot legally take or dispatch emergency calls.
Dinsdale called this a problem that “highlights a couple of things that are broken with this system,” referring to what he called “lax oversight” from the Department of Health.
In Rich County, officials designated a dispatch center, even though none of the dispatchers were licensed. And as recently as February, four centers in the county were taking emergency calls “whose designations had been expired for multiple years.”
In response, Scott Ruff, VECC’s executive director, warned lawmakers that any drastic changes could easily overwhelm neighboring dispatch centers. But he affirmed his staff is working toward improvements.
“We’ve looked at our staffing, our scheduling model, our hiring practices, controlling our turnover and making sure we have the right people for the work we do here,” Ruff said, pointing to an attrition rate that hovers between 35 and 48%.
“It’s a very high number,” he said.
The committee concluded that the auditor general follow up in six months, and again in twelve, to ensure both the Salt Lake 911 Center and VECC “improved their call answering performance,” as Adams put it.
The committee also passed a motion, proposed by Adams, that an “in-depth follow up of 911 audits and review of the 911 staffing” be presented to the executive offices, criminal justice appropriations subcommittee and the public utilities, energy and technology interim committee.