Article Highlights
- The problem: 911 telecommunicators face burnout and low morale
- The solution: PowerLine, an ECC mental health app
- The benefits: Provide wellness resources, reduce burnout, and improve agency morale
The problem: 9-1-1 burnout and low morale
Every day, 911 telecommunicators serve as the first point of contact for individuals facing emergencies. The cumulative effect of responding to these highly emotional, and sometimes traumatic, calls day in and day out can lead to poor mental health in 911 telecommunicators. As telecommunicators navigate the daily demands and stressors of their jobs, your agency is experiencing increasingly higher levels of burnout.
With an understaffed 911 dispatch center, many telecommunicators are working overtime, causing feelings of overwhelm and burnout. Coupled with the fact that there are few mental health resources available, employees at your ECC feel undervalued and unheard, and your 911 center morale is quickly declining.
Because of these issues, telecommunicators have quit in droves and agencies continue to experience poor retention. To make matters worse, the telecommunicators who continue to work despite their feelings of burnout are becoming increasingly cynical and apathetic. All of this erodes your ECC’s culture and effectiveness, making it impossible to provide quality emergency services to the community and uphold your service level agreements with partners. To reduce the likelihood of telecommunicator burnout and its negative effects, centers need to provide telecommunicators with resources to support mental health.
The solution: A 9-1-1 dispatch app
Your telecommunicators don’t have to suffer in silence any longer. PowerLine by PowerDMS is a one-stop mobile app that provides telecommunicators with 24/7 access to support groups and wellness resources.
Complete library of resources
When individuals are experiencing 911 burnout, they can turn to the complete library of wellness content included in PowerLine’s mobile app. These resources were built exclusively around the challenges that emergency telecommunicators face in both their professional and personal lives. These resources include access to videos, articles, and audio content that are available anytime, anywhere.
Nationwide network of peers
PowerDMS’s 911 dispatch app also provides telecommunicators with access to a nationwide network of volunteer peers. Using a specialized algorithm that factors in a telecommunicator’s rank and level of experience, telecommunicators are matched with peers experiencing the same struggles for anonymous one-on-one conversations and support. Telecommunicators who prefer group settings can also attend topic-specific virtual group sessions that are moderated by volunteers.
Complete anonymity
The best part? Telecommunicators can use all of the resources in the PowerLine ECC app with complete anonymity. In-app activity is not associated with telecommunicators’ identities. They are never reported to supervisors or watched by the agency, and all browsing data is deleted after a telecommunicator anonymously accesses it.
The benefits of mental wellness apps
PowerDMS’s 911 dispatch app promotes ECC mental health and enables telecommunicators to get support whenever and wherever they’re in need. And because telecommunicators remain completely anonymous while they access resources and talk through job challenges with peers, they don’t have to worry about judgment.
These wellness resources reduce 911 burnout so employees are less likely to leave your agency. All of this improves your emergency communications center culture and retention, enabling your ECC to maintain a high level of public safety service.
Get started
Schedule a demo today to learn how PowerDMS’s ECC app can reduce burnout and improve well-being at your agency.