'Pull yourself together,' Tara Costigan's sister told

First of all I feel for the civilian call taker who took the call. He was only doing what he was trained to do and that is to follow the script. If he was a highly trained experienced paramedic, common sense would have kicked in and a lot of those questions would not have been asked because it was pretty obvious what he was dealing with.

And what is scary about all this, the tragedy aside, our Minister for Emergency Services Simon Corbell and the current ESA Commissioner Dominic Lane, think that this is an acceptable standard. So much so, they announced in late June that they are planning on taking highly trained and experienced career Firefighters out of the Command centre and replacing them with script reading civilians.

This is the article from the Canberra Times on 28th June 2016;

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/union-lashes-plan-to-remove-firefighters-from-acts-emergency-call-centre-20160628-gptnqi.html

miz said :

bringontheevidence said :

Some of these 000 operators need to be more empathetic and sensitive when dealing with callers. In 1999 my father died in the toilet of our house and my mother came home and found him. I phoned 000 and was calmly giving the details to the ambulance operator. My mother was almost hysterical and yelled to me to tell them to hurry up. I said “And could you please hurry?”. The operator then launched into an extraordinary rebuke and castigated me severely for saying that. I’ve seen several reports over the years about insensitive behaviour by 000 operators so perhaps there should be regular training in how better to deal with stressful situations and agitated callers.

What was the rush?

We didn’t know he was dead at the time, my mother thought he could be revived and that a delay could be fatal or injurious. While I personally was happy that the man who was constantly drunk and bashing us all the time was finally gone, my mother thought it was her wifely duty as a Greek spouse to get help as soon as possible. Looking back I now realise that I should have ignored her plea when I was on the phone and continued to deal calmly with the 000 operator, but we had never had a death in the family before and it was very much unchartered territory as to seeking help and dealing with 000.

bringontheevidence said :

Some of these 000 operators need to be more empathetic and sensitive when dealing with callers. In 1999 my father died in the toilet of our house and my mother came home and found him. I phoned 000 and was calmly giving the details to the ambulance operator. My mother was almost hysterical and yelled to me to tell them to hurry up. I said “And could you please hurry?”. The operator then launched into an extraordinary rebuke and castigated me severely for saying that. I’ve seen several reports over the years about insensitive behaviour by 000 operators so perhaps there should be regular training in how better to deal with stressful situations and agitated callers.

What was the rush?

Thirty years ago when I rang ‘000’ in NSW,after coming upon a baseball bat bashing,this was their response…’well,you ring the police and I’ll ring the ambulance’.

justin heywood said :

Most empathetic people shouldn’t handle 000 calls. Do you want them to help our make you feel better?

This x 100.

They should be reassuring of the caller. I recently had an experience where I had to call 000 to get an ambulance for my little boy who had fallen over badly. I could not believe how many times I was asked my address or my phone number. Like did they not have call number display? A good example of what not to do should be the Lindt Cafe siege. The audio file is available online freely and here is a rough picture of what occurred: https://au.news.yahoo.com/nsw/a/31151195/lindt-cafe-manager-told-to-hang-on-as-police-dispatcher-didnt-know-where-martin-place-was-during-000-call/#page1

I feel for the 000 operator. It is hard to think of a more thankless job.

They are trained to ask a series of questions – no matter what. Their heart rates can go from normal to extreme spikes in no time at all so the training is supposed to kick in. It must be an extremely stressful job and it would be so hard to decompress each day.

Most empathetic people shouldn’t handle 000 calls. Do you want them to help our make you feel better?

Some of these 000 operators need to be more empathetic and sensitive when dealing with callers. In 1999 my father died in the toilet of our house and my mother came home and found him. I phoned 000 and was calmly giving the details to the ambulance operator. My mother was almost hysterical and yelled to me to tell them to hurry up. I said “And could you please hurry?”. The operator then launched into an extraordinary rebuke and castigated me severely for saying that. I’ve seen several reports over the years about insensitive behaviour by 000 operators so perhaps there should be regular training in how better to deal with stressful situations and agitated callers.

I heard that on the news and was gobsmacked! The Operator was obviously was incapable of deviating from the script. SO sad in every respect.