WASHINGTON (7News) — Director of DC’s 911 call center points to staffing shortages when grilled by councilmembers
The D.C. Council Committee for the Judiciary and Public Safety held a public roundtable hearing Monday to get to the bottom of recent failures with the Office of Unified Communications, or OUC, that may have played a role in recent tragedies.
OUC runs the city’s 911 call center and has been plagued by delays and system outages that have had an impact on callers experiencing delays in getting an answer during emergency situations.
“In emergencies, mere seconds can be a matter of life or death,so the standard for our emergency response must be 100 % accuracy. Unfortunately, this has not been the case in recent years in the District,” said Councilmember Brooke Pinto, the chair of the committee. “OUC’soperational problems and mistakes have resulted in injuries, tragic deaths, and a public perception that calling 911 in D.C. simply won’t always deliver speedy and accurate help when residents need it the most. All District residents deserve to be safe and to know emergency response will be fast, well-executed, well-equipped, well-staffed, and 100 % accuracy day and night.”
Pinto said she has introduced a bill requiring the public release of after-action reports when errors occur.
D.C.’s 911 call center is one of the busiest in the country, receiving around 1.8 million calls in 2023.
However, not all of these calls have been handled properly, according to city leaders.
During Monday’s hearing, Pinto pointed out two key incidents. In May, a D.C. Fire and EMS crew was dispatched to the wrong quadrant while the caller continued waiting, only for firefighters not to arrive.
This past August, OUC again came under fire after there was a two-hour technological outage during a call for an unconscious 5-month-old baby who later died. The contractor who mistakenly caused the outage has since been fired, Pinto said.
For Colleen Costello, the issues laid out during Monday’s hearing were a painful reminder of her own experience with the District’s 911 call center.
“We gave up on D.C., unfortunately,” Costello said.”There were just too many red flags. I watched my neighbor almost die right in front of me because the 911 call center was broken.”
In April 2023, Costello had to call 911 when her neighbor was suffering a medical emergency.
“My neighbor’s mom came over to my house and said she had been trying to get on the phone with 911 for at least five minutes and couldn’t get through to anyone,” Costello said. “I was probably on hold for almost 10 minutes before somebody finally connected.”
That waiting time felt like an eternity, Costello said.
“In the meantime, my neighbor who had been suffering an asthma attack lost consciousness, I believe would have died had her mom and I not performed CPR on her,” Costello said. “I just think that’s a really unfair position to put residents in that they have to rely on their neighbors to save their lives because the nation’s capital doesn’t have the resources or willpower to provide those types of resources to us.”
Earlier this year, Costello and her family made the decision to move.
“We’re responsible for two children now,” Costello said. “I know I couldn’t forgive myself if anything, heaven forbid, had happened to them, and they were harmed or killed because we couldn’t get help through D.C.’s 911 call center.”
During Monday’s hearing, councilmembers grilled OUC Director Heather McGaffin and Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice Lindsey Appiah over these incidents.
“We are strengthening our team, hiring and retention, upgrading our technology, and expanding training,” McGaffin said. “We are on the phone longer with people because of an increase in the complexity of call times. One of the most significant increases we have seen is in mental health call times. We’re staying on the phone longer with those callers to make sure they have the right care.”
Appiah added: “The systems continue to be taxed as the demand for emergency services in the city steadily increases. We must provide reliable, redundant, and technically diverse capability.”
Staffing was the central issue discussed during Monday’s hearing.
Pinto said she made an unannounced visit to the 911 call center late Saturday night. She was told there should be between 18 and 20 staff members for the shift, but there were only 15 because of call-outs.
“This past Saturday night, I made an unannounced visit to OUC during the overnight shift. There were only three Fire and EMS dispatchers who were present when, ideally, there should be at least six. Furthermore, there was only one EMS dispatcher handling dispatch for the entire city,” Pinto said. “This is not only unacceptable, but extremely dangerous. Staffing has to be a priority – the priority – for this agency.”
McGaffin said the minimum number of call takers for that particular shift is 17, which means OUC was still understaffed the night Pinto visited.
Currently, OUC has 83 full-time call takers and 24 vacancies, though they have extended four offers. The agency has 91 full-time dispatchers, three part-time, and 18 vacancies.
To try and fill vacancies, OUC has instituted a $2,500 hiring bonus plus an $800-per-month bonus for employees who have 100% attendance.
The need for such bonuses, according to McGaffin and Appiah, came from the number of times call takers and dispatchers called out, leaving them below minimum staffing standards. Councilmember Christina Henderson also pointed out OUC had to dole out $3.5 million in overtime pay.
“This indicates to me we have a staffing capacity issue and an agency culture problem that also needs to be addressed and improved,” Henderson said.
McGaffin said the attendance incentive has worked.
In the month before the incentive, they had an average staffing level at 84% of minimum staffing standards, but that jumped up to 102 % after the pay bump.
“We’re looking at accountability. We’re looking at why people aren’t coming to work. Everybody has a different reason. With that, we have also brought on a wellness coordinator full-time. She is there for our staff, and she has been working with them on a multitude of things: childcare, housing, transportation. People are not showing up for a multitude of reasons, and we want to make sure we are holding ourselves accountable, but also holding them accountable to that and helping them to pave ways forward so it’s easier for them to come to work,” McGaffin said. “The incentives are working. In August, we introduced the incentive and 94 employees attended 100 % of their scheduled shifts and received the bonus.”
Staffing is not the only issue when it comes to delays in calls.
McGaffin said call volume also plays a role.
“A lot of the complaints we get about long wait times are around those spikes – gunshots being the number one for that. People hear gunshots and they call, and there are more people calling than we have call takers available,” McGaffin said.
Appiah added there are challenges when it comes to improving their technology.
“As you add technology, you need to add expertise. Now, the pool of who has expertise in all of these interconnected systems is not large,” Appiah said. “We’re doing work to make sure even if there’s an outage, that we’re tracking the real-time availability of units, no matter what system is up or down.”
However, Pinto said she still wants more out of OUC.
When discussing staffing, McGaffin and Appiah were mostly talking about hiring back to minimum staffing standards.
“Even if we fill all of the vacancies, we’re still not going to be where we need to be when it comes to staffing, in my view,” Pinto said during a media gaggle after the hearing. “What is clear is a lot more needs to be done to get more folks in the door and fully staff up this agency, that we do a better job around retention, so we don’t lose people.”
Pinto said she plans on holding more of these roundtables with OUC throughout the fall.
In the meantime, Costello said she thinks McGaffin needs to take more immediate action.
“I think they’ve got to move a lot faster. I don’t think a couple of roundtables over a couple of weeks or a couple of months is going to move things along fast enough,” Costello said. “I don’t know why we keep giving [McGaffin] a stage to defend herself. I think the best defense OUC, the 911 call center, can launch at this point is to actually show some improvement.”
https://www.wjla.com/news/local/washington-dc-ouc-office-of-unified-communications-911-dispatch-call-center-emergency-response-staffing-shortage-delays-tech-outages-issues-director-heather-mcgaffin-public-safety-dc-council-hearing
