Dispatch Roles

Radio Operator

The Radio Operator's key responsibility is to manage the radio traffic on the Paralake Emergency Services Radio from all government employees. This can range from the request of other services such as Paramedics, Fire Department, additional Police resources or the creation / closure of incidents. This can be quite a stressful role due to the amount of people utilising the government radio. However, be confident in asking units to standby unless urgent so you can finish a process.

Incident Dispatcher

As the incident dispatcher, it is your responsibility to dispatch services to incoming incidents to Paralake, there are three types of ways an incident comes into our Control Room:

• Verbal 911 calls

• Written 911 call reports

• Automatically generated incidents (Life Alerts, Stolen Vehicles, Burglar Alarms, etc)

Each incident we receive into the Control Room needs to be triaged by you and you need to assess the priority of it being broadcasted for units to attend. You may also come across duplicate calls, if there's a large scale incidents you may recieve a number of Life Alerts and written 911 reports. Choose the first incident as the master incident and close the others, this keeps the incident stack tidy and prevents confusion. Ensure to update the master incident with the amount of Life Alerts or other useful detail.

Some Incident Dispatchers choose to assign employees without contacting them verbally on radio first. This is fine and situational dependent. It's mostly used for EMS / Fire Department as the incidents are usually clearly understood with no additional information

Once you have Dispatched an incident to units and assigned accordingly it will then move to the responsibility of the Radio Operator to take ownership of the incident.

Administrative Operator

The role of the Administrative Operator is to supplement the work of the Radio Operator and Incident Dispatcher. The Admin Operator conducts a lot of the house keeping of the Control Room, this could be certain text based requests such as callsign changes and correct callsigns are in use. 

Below are some tasks you may carry out as an Admin Operator:

• Check CCTV for additional information of an on-going incident

• Conduct name, property or licence plate checks

• Assist with text based administrative tasks such as callsign changes

• Relieve Radio Operator / Incident Dispatcher when required

• You may be required to Radio Operate for a specific incident, this could be when there are several large scale incidents occuring. You will be asked or may suggest to take over one of them to allow the Radio Operator to focus on other incidents