By David Larson

Presenter: Jeanie Pharis

This session was a comprehensive overview of incident dispatch teams (IDT). Jeanie Pharis broke the teams down into easy to understand concepts to bring the whole IDT picture into focus.

“An incident dispatch team is a group of trained dispatchers who respond to the scene of large scale events/incidents and work the varying levels of communications at the incident as opposed to the dispatch center.”

Jeanie provided the attendees with needed ammunition for them to develop, train, and gain agency buy-in for tactical dispatching and incident dispatch teams. These teams can play a vital role in natural disasters, hazardous materials operations, multiple alarm fires, large scale incidents, full scale training exercises and mobile command posts. An all-hazards incident dispatch team must know their incident command structure in order to know how to function in the field.

The session emphasized that, although having an incident dispatch team is a “difficult sell” that doesn’t end when the team is formed, telecommunicators should “know your worth” and how communications professionals’ skills in multitasking and listening are typically beyond those of other first responders.

Policies must be in place, qualifications must be ironed out and budgets must be taken into consideration before an IDT can be established. These planning elements pay off when a telecommunicator is freed from the emergency communications center to dedicate his or her time to the incident. “When you’re on scene you have a better grasp of what’s going on,” Jeanie stated. Telecommunicators are a critical, if often overlooked, component of a successfully mitigated incident.