International Comparison
Hello ladies and gents. I’m a Police Dispatcher in Australia and I am curious to see a comparison between the roles of Police, Ambulance, and Fire Call Takers and Dispatchers between our two countries.
I’ve heard that in the US there are many operations centres per state with different counties having their own operations centres, but I’m not sure how that works or if that is correct. Here in Australia, we have 6 states despite the size of our country and each state has between 1-3 operations centres. In Victoria for instance, there are 3 centres but all are linked so a call taker or dispatcher could essentially work shifts at any one of them or transfer to any one of them. We can also choose to multi skill so we could essentially be trained in all emergency services and just work shifts across all services. Many of us are trained for 2-3 emergency services and each additional service comes with a multi skilled pay rise.
How it works here: The caller calls 000 (Triple Zero) and their call is answered by a Telstra emergency 000 operator who asks the caller what town, city and emergency service they require. They are then directed to the relevant operations centre and emergency service in whatever state they have chosen. This process takes seconds unless we have calls waiting in which case they may be on hold for a short period of time. The majority of the time there is no wait time but there are random surges throughout the day due to workload or lack of staff that shift.
We start out as Call Takers and can remain as Call Takers if we choose or ask to be trained for Dispatch. Call Takers take the emergency call and process the job, sending it through to a Dispatcher who organises the emergency service units to attend to the job. We do it as a two part process like this as the Dispatcher can be talking over the radio while the Call Taker is still on the phone to the caller which works very efficiently so there are no delays in our response. We have all three services within the same centre and a Police Dispatcher can also view or type into Fire and Ambulance jobs as everything is linked within CAD so communication is seamless.
Shifts are 12 hours and are usually 0700-1900 or 1900-0700 on a rotating roster. 2 day shifts and 2 night shifts per week but we have flexibility so can revise our roster to work all days, all nights or different hours to suit ourselves. Some people do for instance, 1200-0000, 1300-0100 and so forth. We also have part time and casual staff.
We get a paid 30 minute break every 1.5 hours and our roster is strict on this to ensure that everyone gets 6 x 30 min breaks per shift.
Annual leave or as you guys might call it, vacation leave, is 5 weeks per year plus an additional 2 weeks in lieu per year. So 7 weeks a year of paid leave in total.
Personal leave aka Sick or Carers leave is set at 125 paid hours per year to use as we see fit. It accumulates so if we don’t use it all within a year, it just carries over to the next year. Same with all our leave.
Superannuation (similar to your 401K) is paid at 13% on top of our wages into our nominated retirement fund.
Our wage increases per year by 3% but also goes up due to years of service or what skills we are trained in. I started off on around $58K USD initially but as a Senior Dispatcher trained in two emergency services, I’m now on around $90K USD. That’s without overtime. Overtime is always available so I usually do around 1-2 shifts a month for some extra money but it’s purely our choice if we do overtime. They never ask us to do overtime either. We either put our availability in or they send text messages out for overtime when needed.
Penalty rates work as follows. Monday to Friday during the day incur no penalty rates but if we work a Monday to Thursday night, we get 30% penalty per hour. Friday nights incur a 60% penalty per hour. Saturday day 60%, Saturday night 100% and all day Sunday incurs 100%. Overtime is paid at 100% per hour regardless of what day or hours we work. So a 12 hour overtime shift for me is worth $778 USD for the shift.
If we get tired of Call Taking or Dispatching roles and don’t want to move into another service, we can move into a management role or support/admin role but I won’t go into that.
Hope to hear back from some of you soon and hi from Australia! :)