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How AI could be used to lighten the load for Penobscot County dispatchers

Director Chris Lavoie said dispatchers are taking a high number of non-emergency calls for people who call in asking questions for basic, searchable information.

BANGOR, Maine — Penobscot County dispatch has reported a nearly 30 percent increase in the number of calls in the past five years, and it has agency looking at advancements in technology as a way to lighten the workload without compromising on care.

From 2018 to 2022, there was a 28 percent increase in the calls that are routed to the Penobscot Regional Communications Center. 

Director Chris Lavoie said he is working a group of managers and directors of police departments and information technology departments to explore how Amazon artificial intelligence, or AI, can be incorporated to relieve dispatchers from their heavy call load.

When people in Penobscot County call the 207-945-4636 business line, it's possible they may be speaking to an AI agent. 

Lavoie said the department has not made any final decisions, but he is considering how AI could work to their benefit. He said if AI intelligence is used, it would only be used on the business line, and it would never be applied or be used to answer 9-1-1 calls that come in on the emergency line or to replace the human component needed to handle high-stress emergency response calls. 

Dispatchers at the center took 53,550 9-1-1 emergency and 9-1-1 non-emergency business line calls combined in 2018, and the call volume spiked to 68,443 calls in 2022, Lavoie said. 

At least 1,000 9-1-1 and business line calls are routed to the center daily, he said. Dispatchers at the communications center take and routes calls and monitor radio traffic for 66 police, fire and EMT agencies throughout Penobscot County, including two fire departments in Aroostook County.

"When you call your local police department thinking that you’re going to be talking to a police officer there, you’re actually talking to a 911 dispatcher in Bangor," Lavoie said. "You’re wondering when the snowplow is going to come by so you can go to work. Those calls are not going to your police or fire departments anymore. They’re coming here."

According to Lavoie, the Bangor Police Department and the University of Maine Police Department are the only two departments that have their own dispatchers and manage their own 9-1-1 emergency and 9-1-1 non-emergency business line calls. 

Lavoie said his dispatchers are overloaded. He said although the current public and mental health crises, domestic violence and drug addiction and epidemic has resulted in an increase in 9-1-1 emergency calls, his dispatchers are also taking a high number of non-emergency calls for people who call in asking questions for basic information that could be found online. 

"I can’t justify to you that I couldn’t take your call for your loved one’s cardiac arrest, because I’m on the phone with something that could’ve been done through an online reporting system," Lavoie said.

Training supervisor at PRCC Michael Azevedo has worked at the center for 26 years, and he has worked in public safety for 33 years. He said a number of the calls that dispatchers receive aren't relative to their office.

"'What’s the phone number for this?' 'How long is the power going to be out?'" Azevedo said. "We’re not the power company. We don’t know, but they call us because they think we do."

Supervisor and scheduling manager Betty Stone has been at PRCC for 24 years. She said when dispatchers are stuck on non-emergency calls, high priority calls end up circling in the queue until another dispatcher is available.

"We believe that all our calls are important, and they need to be handled," Stone said. "Of course, the more emergent calls need to be handled first."

Stone said it takes a caring person to work as a dispatcher, and she said some of the most horrific 9-1-1 calls never leave her mind. She said the hardest calls for her to take are calls that involve children who are harmed or who are in danger. 

Stone said it's difficult to manage the heavy call volume when true emergency calls are mixed in with non-emergency calls.

Lavoie said his team of dispatchers is slim, and there are currently only six dispatchers in the center. He said he is hiring aggressively, but it takes six months to a year before new employees are able to work on their own.  

"We need to hire six more people," he said. "We have six in training currently. So, on the schedule, we’re really down 12 people."

Azevedo said he’s often training new hires who have no experience at all in public safety, and because dispatchers run a 24-hour operation, it’s hard to get people to say yes to the job.

"The trainings we’re hiring today have no public safety background," Azevedo said. "So, you gotta teach them to dispatch, and you gotta teach them what a fire truck is and what an ambulance is and what those people do."

With such a small staff, Stone said she has a hard time making sure employees get the proper time off that they need while still keeping enough bodies in the building to take and dispatch calls. 

Azevedo said taking so many non-emergency calls with only six people working during the week and four people working on the weekend, callers who have true emergencies are waiting longer to get the help that they need.

"If we get seven 9-1-1 calls at once and there’s six of us, one of them can’t get answered, and we don’t have time to spend appropriately with the people that we should," Azevedo said.

Lavoie said much of the reason the center takes and routes calls for nearly every police, fire and EMT department in Penobscot County is because those individual departments within the county have lost staff members who at one time occupied imperative job roles. Many departments no longer have secretaries or employees to fill critical job positions due to lack of available funding, low budgets, and the steady decline in the public workforce. 

Azevedo and Lavoie both agreed the decrease in the workforce in Maine and all across the country makes it nearly impossible for public safety departments to maintain regular, effective day-to-day business functions. 

"Fire stations can’t hire, ambulances can’t hire, police departments can’t hire, and the dispatch centers can’t hire," Azevedo said. "Without people, none of these services will continue to go."

Azevedo said fire stations don't even have enough ambulance vehicles, and dispatchers are often searching for ambulances to send to people in extreme medical circumstances, sometimes forcing firefighters and EMTS to rush from Waterville as far as to Newport, from one end of Penobscot county to the next.

Stone said dispatchers fill an important and selfless role, and despite the challenges public safety departments face, she said she loves what she does. 

Azevedo said he's open to seeing how using AI technology can improve work functions, because dispatchers can easily get burnt out. 

"So...yea, at the end of a twelve-hour shift, most of us go home, and I won't say I don't look forward to coming back tomorrow, but on my next few days off I won't even think about this place," Azevedo said.

Lavoie said introducing AI technology to daily work functions will follow a phased approach.

   

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