dispatchers Archives - Situational Awareness Matters!™

The Communications Specialist Role in Forming Situational Awareness

Leave a Comment / Accountability, Article, Assumptions, Attention Management, Auditory exclusion, Confabulation, Distractions and Interruptions, Emotions, Risk Assessment, Size Up / Rich Gasaway

Some of the least appreciated members of the emergency response team are the communications specialists (in some venues, termed dispatchers). How do I know this? First, I served as a communications specialist (my job title was “dispatcher”) early in my career and I was routinely subjected to criticism and ridicule from responders because the information […]

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Dispatchers Role in Situational Awareness

4 Comments / Article, Communications, Crew Resource Management, Decision Making, Equipment, Firefighter Situational Awareness, Information overload, Mayday and RIT, Personnel location, Safety, Situational awareness, Standard Operating Procedures/Guidelines, Teamwork, Training, Workload Management / Rich Gasaway

One of the situational awareness best practices discussed during the Fifty Ways to Kill a First Responder program is the role played by the dispatcher during an emergency incident. As I have discussed this many times with first responders throughout the United States I have come to the conclusion that in some jurisdictions the dispatcher

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Complex Communications

4 Comments / Article, Attention Management, Auditory exclusion, Communications, Decision Making, Firefighter Situational Awareness, Human Behavior, Human Factors, Information overload, Mayday and RIT, Safety, Situational awareness, Standard Operating Procedures/Guidelines, Stress / Rich Gasaway

We have many traits that make us uniquely human. Among them is our ability to engage in complex communications. We can look at black ink squiggled on a piece of bleached paper and derive meaning from those symbols. We call that skill reading comprehension. And we can listen to and comprehend the meaning of more

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