This week is International Control Room Week, so we've been getting a behind-the-scenes look at ours.
Today we're hearing from Glen Corlett who's a supervisor in the Emergency Services Joint Control Room Operations Manager.
In the UK, demand on the service is continuing to rise, with it taking longer to respond to calls and, in some places, ambulances queuing outside hospitals to get their patients help.
Glen's been telling Amy Griffiths what the picture is like here:
Hi there. I'm Amy Griffiths and I'm one of the journalists in Manx Radio's Newsroom and you're listening to Newscast. My name's Glenn Callows. I'm one of the supervisors in the control room. I've been here since its inception, which is coming up to 21 years ago. So the control room will have gone live 21 years ago next May. So I've been one of the original ones here in that time. Start off as an operator, promoted through to supervisors. So within a daily role, it's the case of making sure that we've got police fire ambulance dispatched out to jobs. We answer the calls that come in, work out which ones need a response, triage them and basically get help to people that need the help on the island. It's just a small job then. Just a little bit. It changes every day, which is great. So you're obviously coming into work. You've got no idea what your workload is going to be like for that day. I think that's one of the really good challenges about it. You don't know what to expect and we're sort of trained for every situation that comes in. You mentioned challenges, what are some of the biggest challenges that you're facing here in the control room each day? Demand sometimes outstrips what we have resource available wise, which is why we have the triage systems in place. And that's mainly the biggest challenges on that side of it is to make sure that we do get help to those people in the right time frame, whether it be police, fire or ambulance, because obviously there's a tri control room. We've got all three services that we deal with. So that's the biggest challenge. Obviously during busy periods, it's a bit like spinning plates, but it's a nice challenge. And I suppose you must probably find as well that different people have different interpretations of what constitutes an emergency as well. Absolutely. So we could have anything from something very minor, which is something obviously very major like a multi-agency RTC with people that are injured on there. And an emergency can be an emergency for that person. It's not necessarily for us to judge what they would deem as an emergency themselves. But that's why we have protocols in place to be able to get the right help to the right people at the right time, as we have clinical navigators that will go through some more lower acuity stuff. And they may sign post patients to a different area instead of using a frontline ambulance. Or we also have first contact officers for the police. They may be able to deal with something over the telephone rather than us actually sending officers around to an address. It all depends, and we obviously make sure that each person at phones or phone needs a response gets the right response. And the clinical navigators are quite new roles. So what kind of an impact are they having to services? The impact has been great. It could be that they upgrade calls or downgrade calls, signpost people into a different direction. So it's been nice as a new element into the control room that we're getting to work with additional people as well, get to know other people from the services and integrate ourselves with them as well within the control room. So they've had a great impact and they've obviously worked in with us as a team great as well. And in terms of the actual nitty gritty and how deployment works, how does that process happen? It all depends so for the likes of an ambulance job that will come in. The job will appear on a screen, whilst the call taker is asking questions. Sometimes a member of the public may think that we're asking too many questions, but we already have help on the way whilst those questions are being asked. And we're just triaging it to the right area of the right time because not everything will need a blue lights and sirens response. So that will go through. So we're all qualified as controllers and dispatches. So one person will take the call, another person will dispatch it at the same time as the call is going on. So there's never any delay. And thankfully here on the Isle of Man, the picture isn't the same as it is in the UK in terms of the height of demand on services, but it's certainly increasing as the message that I'm hearing from people here. Would you agree? Yeah, we do get times where there is not a backlog, but it's busier and it might take us a little bit longer to get things put through to people. Again, the triage system is exactly there for that purpose. We're not as bad as some hospitals or NHS trusts in the UK, where they've got 20 vehicles at that A&E bay waiting to sort of go in. We're not at that stage thankfully. And the same with the police and fire in terms of resources. It is busier, but we've got things in place to be able to sort of get the right things done at the right time. So hopefully there shouldn't be too much impact on people. Because do you ever find that by some sheer challenge you've got three cat ones that have come in and you don't have enough resources to send to them? Is that something that ever happens? We can have jobs that come in where we end up with a bit of a queue. The category one jobs, for example, are obviously the highest category that we can have for ambulance calls. We have ambulance duty officers that are always on call. So the decision doesn't always end with me as a supervisor, thankfully. A lot of the time we can find extra resources. We have community first responders on duty who have volunteers. We have staff standby. We've got staff that are also put ambulance headquarters as well. So if needs be, we can normally get resources out at a bit of a not a last minute thing, but sort of we can normally find a resource to go to it. So we haven't been completely caught out. And do you think that sometimes the control room can be forgotten about? It's almost a fourth emergency service in that way. Do you think that sometimes that people just forget that you're here in that your your own separate entity as well? Yes, we agree. We're very much in the background. We are forgotten about a lot because we're not flying around everywhere on blue lights and sirens. So we we aren't at the sort of front end in terms of how the public would see us on that side of it. We're obviously we're described as the first first responders within the control room and obviously have the integral part of getting all the resources out. We've not been recognised for a lot of things in the past. It's not something that we look for. You know, it's not a job that we've come into wanting recognition. A lot of it has come through obviously in terms of the introduction of social media for the control room over the last 18 months. So we're on Facebook, Twitter or X as it's now called and also Instagram. And obviously we've just had some really good publicity that we've just been accredited as a center of excellence as well for the handling and dispatching of medical calls. And you mentioned at the start, you've been here since the very beginning. You have helped build this to what it is now. What has kept you here for 21 years? A lot of things. I'm very proud of my job. There's a few of us that are still here right from the very beginning. Very proud of what the job has become, how it has developed, what extra things we now do compared to what it was when we first started 21 years ago. It is something that I'm immensely proud of and I'm very passionate about as well. Enjoy the social media side and getting to know people. Obviously we've had the Great North Air Ambulance service up today as well visiting us. So it's a great opportunity to show off what we do as basically we were the world's first ever true drink control room. And that's something that we're really, really proud of. And do you think that that's a model that other jurisdictions can look to imitate and to copy and to utilize? Because I mean from an outsider's perspective and having just had the tour today, seeing all three emergency services being responded to by the same people who were able just to click a little drop down menu and either select one, two or three services makes an awful lot of sense. It makes a huge amount of sense. So it came in as part of a review. It cuts down a response times. So especially for the likes of multi-agency road traffic collision where all three services are required, back in the day you might have only got one phone call for it. So it's difficult for one controller in a control room to let other control rooms know exactly what's going on. We can make the decision right here for what resources go out. It's a massive advantage. We've got Jersey and Gunsee, two car leads. They've got similar control rooms now to us manned by civilians and all three services. And we have had visits from around the world in different jurisdictions to sort of see how we're doing it basically and hopefully get the right blueprints from it and get it from the best, I'd like to say. Which must feel you with an immense amount of pride. It does massively. It's nice to be able to give people a tour round to see what we're doing and hopefully replicate it. It wouldn't work everywhere. It works perfectly for the Isle of Man and sort of smaller jurisdictions. I don't know whether it would work in the likes of the middle of London, but it obviously works for us really well and similar jurisdictions around the world. So International Control Room Week, what does that mean to you? I lead up a lot of the Control Room Week stuff on the island. It's a dedicated week this year between the 21st and 27th of October and it's just a chance for us to shout about what we do a little bit to power cells on the back and just to celebrate it basically along with our social media channels and everything else we can tell people what we do, give a little bit of education around it as well. And last year and this year we are taking the opportunity to do that extra spotlight on us really for doing a charity raffle. So we did it for a couple of local charities last year and raised just shy of £4,000 and we're hoping to sort of match that this year for the Great and Rural Fair Ambulance Service, who covered the Isle of Man as well as their energy restriction back in the UK as well. So since we took on the partnership with Genas, they were telling me before that it's 62 times they've now been called out for the island, which is sort of small feat, but they are so reliant on voluntary donations and if we could get a couple of thousand pounds into their pockets to help with expenses then that's great and we can use our platform to hopefully do that as well. Thank you for making it to the end of the Manks 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 Manks Radio podcasts at your favourite podcast provider so our best bits will magically appear on your smartphone. Thank you. [BLANK_AUDIO]
