EMS director responds to error claims

Human error and employee retention are being blamed for a series of errors at Sampson’s E911 center, errors that have caused delayed response times, with fire and rescue personnel being sent to incorrect addresses on more than one occasion.

Rick Sauer, the county’s director of Emergency Services, said late last week that the problems that exist don’t fall just on their department but reflect national issues that need addressing.

“I don’t know what comments he (Taylors Bridge Fire Chief Alan Williams) made, but I can tell you that we made a mistake and that it was a human error,” Sauer said. “While true, nobody comes to work saying, ‘let’s see if I can make a mistake today, right?”’

Williams alerted The Independent last week to errors being made within the communications center, errors which sent rescue units to the wrong address during a recent house fire. The Taylors Bridge fire chief said it was an error that had occurred more than once, and he explained his efforts to reach Sauer and others to alert them to the problem and seek a resolution.

An article in last Wednesday’s paper detailed Williams’ concerns. Sauer could not be reached for comment at that time but did call back after deadline.

During that call, the emergency director offered an explanation for the problem, which continued Saturday when rescue personnel, dispatched to a wreck scene on I-40, were also sent to an incorrect mile marker.

The ongoing problems are happening across the country, according to Sauer, and he noted a big factor is centered around employee retention.

“We have some talented and dedicated telecommunicators,” the director stressed, “but many of them are newer employees, and they have limited experience.” he said.

“This is a nationwide problem, it’s not just in Sampson County, and it’s a recruitment and retention problem.”

Being a telecommunicator or dispatcher at that position is demanding and stressful, Sauer said, and the job is a difficult one.

“You’ve got to be able to multitask. Their pay is low and there’s limited advancement opportunities. There’s high stress, they work long hours on nights, weekends and even holidays. It takes about six months to train telecommunicators, so yes, we made a mistake. Soon as we realized we made the mistake, we took corrective action; it was simply human error.

While citing personnel as a reason he couldn’t talk publicly about many issues, Sauer did point to the almost 113,000 calls that came into and went out of the 911 center last year

— “43,466, of them were 911.”

Keeping and finding employees, he said, is a nationwide problem. But Sauer also said he wasn’t using that as an excuse for the department’s own shortcomings.

But a lack of staffing is taking its toll, he stressed.

“It was only the one call, but I’m not saying that that’s acceptable because it’s one mistake too many,” he asserted, referring to the fire call Williams addressed. “We need to get it right the first time because we are 911, so there’s some training that we need to do currently. I’ve been here for three years or so and we have never been fully staffed in our 911 center. Our full complement of staffing is 20 telecommunicators; we’re down four positions right now that are vacant. That’s 20 percent of our staff, and that has been ongoing.”

Even with the support of the Sampson County Board of Commissioners to fund additional positions for Sauer’s team to better address call frequencies, the vacant jobs remain unfilled.

“We’ve been lucky in terms of our commissioners, and we’re thankful for them,” Sauer noted “They gave us four new positions … I want to say, probably two years ago, to increase our staffing levels because of the volume of our calls continuing to go up. So they created those four new positions for us, but, unfortunately, we’ve had a lot of difficulty filling those positions.

“I was able to justify, and the commissioners agreed with us, that we needed a 911 training officer. In the fiscal 2023-24 budget, they approved a new 911 training officer position for us, and we just filled it last week. So it was vacant for over a year, and the reason is because of recruitment and retention. There’s a lot of responsibilities in that position and nobody essentially wanted the job.

“We have a lot of good people — they’re dedicated, they do the best they can, but we definitely have work to do. We’re working on an improvement plan and our goal is not to make mistakes.”

As for the causes behind how and why a communication error occurs, Sauer said there’s a number a reasons.

“Well, first we do an assessment to try to figure out what happened,” he said. “That said, it could be a human error, it could be a technological error or it could be maybe some other training issue. That’s what we’re looking at now is all these possibilities based on what we know so far, but this current incident was a human error. It was just a human mistake, it was not a technological mistake.”

To ensure that these errors are phased out quickly, and the best they can be, Sauer said steps are already planned.

“We’re going to do some remedial training, then we’re going to do overall staff training and we’re going to continue to do more training,” he said. “Our training officer, she just started last month, and she’s been busy already. She’s going to continue to be busy building our training program.

“In the mean time, like I said, we don’t come to work and say, let’s make a mistake. The community expects us to do better, and we need to do better — that’s our goal.”