This week is International Control Room Week, and we've been getting a behind-the-scenes look at ours.
First up today is Greg Norton.
He's the Emergency Services Joint Control Room Operations Manager and has been telling Amy Griffiths what the role of the ESJCR is:
Hi there I'm Amy Griffiths and I'm one of the journalists in Manx Radio's Newsroom and you're listening to Newscast. I'm Greg Norton the ESJCR Operations Manager. So we are here at the control room can you just talk me through for those who aren't aware just what goes on in here? Well we take emergency 999 calls, we triage them and we provide advice to the callers and we dispatch and coordinate the response for the emergency services. And it's a bit of a different setup to the UK isn't it? Can you talk to me a little bit about that? Well compared to the UK all the travel line calls come direct through to here there is no operator in between us and the travel lines. Obviously in the UK the operator who would take the travel line would ask emergency which service and then would put it through to the relevant control room for that service but again in here we do all of that here. We ask emergency which service and then we'll process it through the relevant software and through the relevant questioning processes to determine all the information that the emergency services need for their response and then we'll dispatch that to them as well. So that can all be ongoing by colleagues whilst the call is incoming to make sure that the response is as quick as possible. So the people working here really do need to have quite a broad range of knowledge to be able to respond effectively don't they? Yes they're arguably some of the most qualified operators in the world in that they can operate for all three services and they're dispatching as well as call taking. So have it be enabled to switch between those topics and those subjects? It's a massive task and it takes that amount of knowledge and skill to be able to do that. And I would assume that there's a perception that the Isle of Man there's only 85,000 people here it's quite a quiet island for the most part particularly comparatively to UK neighbors. Is that the same picture that you have of the Isle of Man here? We have all the same problems that go on in the UK whether that's medical issues whether that's crime issues or whether it's fires it's all to scale. So the differences whilst the UK might have a lot more of these incidents they have a lot more resources that they can deal with. We don't so our control room might take a lot less jobs than a UK control room but we have a lot less operators to deal with it. So comparatively we're as busy as they are just with less resources and again it's the same for the emergency services they can't call on help beyond the island and get a quick response whereas in the UK if Merseyside run out of police officers due to a big incident they can call on neighbouring jurisdictions to support them. We can't do that so we have to rely on ourselves and be independent as much as we can. Have you found that in recent years the number of calls that you're responding to is going up? Yes on the whole the number of calls we deal with has risen dramatically but it's not just us that's experienced in that rise that that's a global rise especially with ambulance calls. Their rise since before Covid has been quite dramatic and we're looking at different ways that we can help and support the ambulance service to deal with that like with the introduction of clinical navigator who can help make sure that the right resource is going to the right job without overusing resources. Because I suppose that's the thing as well is that on the one hand it's probably quite good to be able to be across all of the emergency services know exactly what's going on be able to send all three of necessary at the same time without any other conversations but then on top of that you're having to oversee all of that and with limited resources as well so you're having to try and make decisions to make sure that the people that are getting the help are the ones who are most in need of the help at that moment in time. Yes so we do that triage process at the start of the calls and we're asking questions of the call is to identify what the risks are and whether there's any immediate time risks whether that caller needs an instant response whether they need instant advice to solve a medical issue or to help a patient's prognosis until the help can arrive or again whether they need forensic advice from the police to preserve a scene or anything like that so the triage process that the operators perform on the phone asking questions is absolutely vital and sometimes for the caller who just wants that help there it can be frustrating but they have to understand we're doing that to ensure that they get the right response as quick as possible. So presumably it's not a job that you can just walk off the street and straight into and be able to do straight away there's an awful lot of training that goes into this before you're even able to get into the control room itself. Yeah it's about a three month training program that we undertake with new operators and they go around the emergency services they do various different attachments during those three months as well as some intensive training on the systems that we operate on and then at the end of those three months that's when you'll go into mentor shifts where you'll be expected to start taking calls and that's obviously the nervous moment for them but from that point the learning curve is steep but it's supported and it will probably take them another nine months till they start to feel comfortable doing the job on the day-to-day basis but during that time they've got colleagues and support around them and if they need that help all they have to do is ask for it and we'll try and guide them to get them to that stage where they're comfortable and it's not even just supporting them to get to a stage where they feel comfortable but also supporting them through some potentially really harrowing calls that the people are having to answer to I mean most of the time if people are calling you it's because it's an emergency and because something really wrong has happened and so what kind of support systems are in place for staff here to help cope with that like you say when people call us generally it's during some of the worst times of their life and these operators are effectively dealing with the worst times in people's lives day in day out so to a certain extent you do a harden to it it becomes your normal but we do try and support people and offer them help so if you for example you're taking a traumatic call you may be offered what's called a trim referral which is an interview you would go through a short time after the incident and during that interview they'd be having a casual conversation but looking for risk markers that it's had a psychological effect on you and then that would be repeated after a short period of time because during that short period of time you would expect people to naturally start to recover and get back to normal but if those risk markers are still present after that short period of time then that might indicate that this is having a bigger psychological effect and it might be the trigger to send somebody to get some more specific psychological help to prevent any long-term issues forming as well as that staff have access to staff welfare the counseling service that the government provide and they can go and speak about the issues that they're having there's various things we do and of course their colleagues are always at sport because they go through the same thing on the same day so being able to talk with your colleagues about that incident can sometimes really help to diffuse matters looking at international control room week what is the message that you're hoping to be able to get out there well it's just about the work these people do on a daily basis they do a great job and they work hard for it and largely it's a role that goes without a lot of thanks or appreciation but it is a vital role it's vital to the public and it's vital to the emergency services and they do that role because they want to help people they do that role because they want to support the Isle of Man as a whole so really it's about celebrating that role and celebrating the fantastic work that they do on a daily basis and it's a role that they obviously do well because you've been recognized for it you've had the accreditation to say that you're a center of excellence which you don't get for free no we've put a lot of hard work into that over the last few years and that's not all about getting the recognition it's about making sure you've got the right standards and policies in place and you're doing the right audits and and giving people the right support and feedback but it's nice to have that little bit of recognition at the end of it and it's nice for these guys to be able to say we work at a center that's managed to achieve this A standard and we are Aced Medical Dispatchers. Thank you for making it to the end of the Manx Radio Newscast you are obviously someone with exquisite taste may I politely suggest you might want to subscribe to this and a wide range of Manx Radio podcasts at your favorite podcast provider so our best bits will magically appear on your smartphone thank you (gentle music) You
