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Public contact with the emergency services has evolved from picking up the phone to dial 999 to today when there are myriad online channels meaning a member of the public has a choice how to communicate, so services need to adapt to a demand that requires a flexible and different way of working.
Jo Smith, Head of Mobilising for London Fire Brigade knows this all too well. She has been in the control room for over two decades and has experienced the change in the technology to support new approaches to responding to the public. People ring 999 when they are in crisis and may be going through the worst day of their lives; the calm professional response of a control room operator is the first contact that they may have with the frontline.
Joining a recent Emergency Services Times webinar panel looking at how channel change has affected the way that the emergency services operate, Jo said that the modern control room is filled with social media streams, 24 hour news and digital maps displayed on the walls. All of this enhances the control room officer’s situational awareness of incidents. She also said that BT – where the 999 call is first received – recognises that the world of 999 response is changing and is looking at what the ‘next generation 999’ should entail.
The online world has turned the emergency contact experience on its head as the latest annual Ofcom Online Nation report confirms yet again.
For example, young people spend six hours a day online (that’s twice the time compared with their parents generation) and rarely make a call, preferring to use TikTok and SnapChat instead. The Ofcom survey found that both featured in the top ten of sites most visited by the 18-24 year olds, with 60% (3.2m) of this cohort visiting both Snapchat and TikTok in the month of May alone.
Alex Finn also joined the webinar panel sponsored by tech firm NEC Software Solutions. He runs a programme of work for the National Police Chiefs’ Council where he makes the most of young people’s obsession with social media by finding ways for them to engage positively with the police. He says that young people are taught from a very young age to dial 999 in an emergency and will pick up the phone to do that but not for anything else.
For him, it’s the non-urgent world that’s requires a different approach. His project, Your Police UK, is targeting teens and he knows that they will not use 101, the non-emergency phone number, so using Instagram is working really well to improve engagement ‘upstream’ with prevention messages that resonate with this audience. “We need to understand the value of being in these spaces,” says Alex.
Communication isn’t just about audio, but involves video as well. Tools like GoodSAM enable control room officers to get a view on a scene during an incident using video. “Video is great for on-scene insight,” says Matt Palmer from NEC Software Solutions. It helps decision making by streaming contemporary information direct to the control room. Jo says that around 30% of calls may include use of video provided by the public during an incident and that control room offices are adept at knowing when it’s going to add value to the response.
Multi-channel communication offers opportunities to improve the way that individual services interact with other agencies during an incident.
The development of the Multi Agency Incident Transfer (MAIT) protocol allows just this with services no longer having to pick up the phone to talk to another agency but make digital contact instead. Jo thinks that having all three London blue lights sharing video streams of an incident through control rooms could be a useful development although it doesn’t exist at the moment.
Looking after staff and building resilience
Considering the impact of the changing nature of communication, how do staff stay safe and well and not overwhelmed by a cacophony of information? Jo says staff keep an eye on six information feeds in addition to incoming 999 calls, so the potential for information overload is always there. It is important for control room staff to be resilient and that starts right from recruitment, with a process that ensures potential recruits can respond and thrive in a high pressure environment.
“Increasing demand can break people,” says Matt and technology should do some of the heavy lifting by triaging calls through sentiment or keyword matching to help prioritise calls. In a police context, creating a ‘self service’ environment could mean that instead of a caller ringing a police contact centre to find out the progress of their crime, they can track it in the same way as they track an online delivery. “This will empower citizens and reduce calls to 101 and that’s a real opportunity for efficiency,” argues Matt.
Taking advantage of new technology
In the fire world, Jo says that one incident can result in 60-70 calls in a space of five minutes Asked whether a technology solution that would tell her call operators that they are all from the same place.
“Having a technology platform that told us that the calls were all from the same location and told us what the caller is reporting before they reach a operator would allow us to be much more effective and efficient. I welcome any sort of solution that can pick out key words and key locations and feed that to us quickly.”
Jo Smith, head of mobilising, London Fire Brigade.
The inference is that artificial intelligence could work here, helping emergency services manage demand, but always with guardrails that deal with ethics, bias and other concerns about having a machine in the decision making process.
Matt says he sees real value in AI, so that the right contact gets through and what can best dealt with elsewhere efficiently redirected using technology to relieve pressure on staff and improve wellbeing along the way. This has potential for improving the way that the emergency services deal with vulnerable callers, often those who are repeat callers known to each agency but not collectively.
“If you have called one service, you probably called every service. We do need to get better at sharing what we know about vulnerable callers, putting in multi agency prevention approaches using technology would help all of us improve how we help the public.”
Jo Smith, head of mobilising, London Fire Brigade.
It is clear from this webinar conversation that there is a need to have a plan for dealing with the influx of information from many diverse sources both in emergency and non-emergency situations.
The technology is evolving to provide solutions to help manage this and, as Matt advises, sometimes it needs to be tested in a small, defined way first, then scaled up. Getting it right in one service and then sharing with others chimes with the recent Police Foundation report about scale in policing and applies equally to other parts of the blue lights too.
Watch the full webinar The challenges of taking a multi-channel approach to communicating with the public on catch up now.
