When an emergency happens in the facility, one of my duties aside from sending responders to the location is to guard the radio channel and keep in free for emergency traffic.
Most of the time, this is accomplished simply by announcing "Emergency Radio Traffic Only" over said channel. Occasionally, someone will key up and have traffic unrelated to the situation. Mistakes happen, and usually all it takes is for me to say, "Last unit, we're on Emergency Traffic for [location of emergency]. The proper response by that unit is then, well, silence.
The Kitchen Staff is usually the most frequent offender. That's a whole 'nuther discussion for offline. Twice this week, though, they've taken the reminder of
Emergency Traffic to mean that they should just repeat their non-emergency traffic.
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I love our Nurses. Most of them are spectacular in both what they do and how they do it. There are a small selection, though, that frustrate both myself and our agency's Dispatch center.
Most of our radios are assigned to and programmed for a specific individual. So, when they key up, their name displays on our Console (and Dispatch too). Others are "pool" radios and used by multiple people and identified only by the section using them (i.e. Kitchen, Medical).
Scenario One:Nurse gets a radio from the medical pool, switches it on, and keys up on realizing that somehow it got switched to the dispatch channel. When this happens, our Dispatchers (superheroes really) simply, and gently, remind the user "Last unit, you're on the Dispatch channel." It's not a real big deal, in the grand scheme of things. Planets aren't going to explode, zoo animals aren't going to revolt, and Jeffery Epstein isn't going to rise from the dead. Just change the channel back to where it's supposed to be and move on.
However, some don't do that. When the above situation happens, I try to raise them on our channel to ensure they are ok, and to verify the name of the Nurse so that I can make a mental note correlating the radio ID with the name (a few Nurses call me to tell me their radio number, most do not). No, no, they panic, put the radio back, get themselves another radio, and then don't respond to my radio calls because all I know is the radio number and they've moved on to another radio.
Scenario Two:Nurse presses the Emergency Button on the radio. Many times its accidental, but each instance has to be treated as a potential emergency until it is verified they are "Code 4," either by themselves or another staff member calling out on their behalf.
When the button is pressed, it sends alert tones both to Dispatch and to Me, along with the radio ID. When I know the Name of the person with the pool radio, it's easy to get them to respond since I'm able to voice the name, rather than radio number over the air. When I don't know the name, all I have to go on is the number. Only a handful of Nurses pay attention to the number they picked that shift (and subsequently report it to me), so the rest won't respond to a number. Dispatch will silence the alert tones, but it's up to me to locate and verify the status of the user in question. Gets kinda stressful when someone doesn't answer. Fortunately, I can send "troopers" in to essentially do a head count.
Aggravating is when an individual hits the "pizza button," panics because they see the display flashing and an unfamiliar voice asking their status (Dispatch), so they put the radio away and get another one. Then don't have the professionalism to admit what they've done.
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Fifteen minutes (max) worth of training for these types of users would go a long way in preventing these types of scenarios. Such training has been done in the past, but was stopped because some people thought it was "boring."
Make Orwell fiction again.