The 911 telecommunicators at the Combined Communications Center in Gainesville will be the first in the nation to be certified in a program that helps them better respond to people in a mental health crisis and to better cope with their own job stress.
By Cindy Swirko
The work of the people who answer and dispatch 911 calls can be gut wrenching — crashes, murders, medical emergencies.
Suicides are among the worst.
But the 911 telecommunicators — the term used for call-takers and dispatchers — at the Combined Communications Center in Gainesville will become the first in the nation to be certified in a program that helps them better respond to people in a mental health crisis and to better cope with their own job stress, said Jim Lanier, who oversees technical services at the center.
“Telecommunicators have some difficulty in dealing with people in mental health crisis. It’s primarily because the training we receive doesn’t really prepare us for that,” Lanier said. “Because we haven’t been trained to deal with it effectively, it becomes a situation that is uncomfortable for the call taker … They don’t feel like they have a sense of call mastery, which is important for them — to be able to maintain control of the situation as much as possible and feel like they’ve also contributed to maybe a positive outcome.”
So the center’s employees, who handle calls for most law enforcement and fire agencies in the county, are getting trained in a set of protocols called Enhanced Mental Health Dispatching/LifeBridges.
LifeBridges was created by Jim Marshall, co-founder and director of the 911 Training Institute.
Through LifeBridges, telecommunicators learn to try to keep a caller who is contemplating suicide or in mental health crisis engaged and on the line, using empathy to build trust.
The goal is withhold judgment and to understand that the caller is not “crazy,” but in crisis — having a psychiatric attack instead of a heart attack, Lanier said.
Training also aims to ease the emotional impact on telecommunicators, who often feel stress when handling callers in a mental health crisis.
Telecommunicator Jeff Andress has answered many such calls during his nine years at the center and said they can be difficult.
Some hang up. Others just want someone to listen to them and to get assistance.
The training has been a big help for telecommunicators in handling the callers and their own emotions, Andress said.
“It has helped us communicate better and identify their needs and their interest and the capability of hurting themselves — what tools and means they have to do it and what we can to do help them through the current crisis they’re in,” Andress said. “We’re also learning how to take care of ourselves with these difficult callers in distress so that we don’t get either compassion fatigue or take on too much and get our own level of (post-traumatic stress).”
Once the software is set up, the information and a recording of the conversation will be available to responding officers via their in-car computers and to mental health professionals if the caller is taken to a stabilization center.
Lanier said that will bridge a major gap that often occurs — law enforcement arrives and talks to the caller, who downplays the gravity of the situation.
By hearing the person during the call, responders will get a better sense of the situation and take appropriate action. That could include taking the caller for an involuntary mental health evaluation under Florida’s Baker Act.
And it will also be passed on to the professionals at the care center.
“For example, somebody calls in and is suicidal and gives us very serious information, a lot of lethality. But when responders get there five minutes later they say, ‘I’m fine. I’m just having a bad day.’ Now the responders have to make a decision on whether this person is a threat to themselves or others,” Lanier said. “If they are actually able to hear the words said to the telecommunicator and view the information the telecommunicator gathered — it might be that the music sounds fine, but the words are all wrong.”
Marshall said Alachua County’s communication center, operated by the sheriff’s office, is the pilot for the nation in full training and certification in the program.
Alachua County was chosen, he said, because of a sincere commitment to improving response to mental health calls and to telecommunicators’ well being by Sheriff Sadie Darnell and Lanier.
The well-being of the telecommunicator is essential to working well with distraught callers, Marshall said.
“Callers struggle with huge ambivalence about accepting help. In those moments when suicide is a sad solution to a problem of pain — ‘What if they take me away and lock me up and I don’t heal? I still have my pain.’ And you’ve taken away their control,” Marshall said. “Alachua County has an opportunity, because of the leadership of the sheriff’s office, to provide optimal care to our people with mental illness in their moments of highest risk and to also make a contribution to other communities by example.”
Gainesville.com
