Did you know that there’s a podcast dedicated to giving you some background on emergency dispatch best practices and protocol updates—and you can get CDE credit for listening to it? You read that right. For every episode of Dispatch in Depth you listen to, you can get half an hour of CDE credit, and with 75 episodes and counting that’s a lot of certification options! All you have to do is listen to the episode then go to the College of Emergency Dispatch and take a short quiz. As long as you don’t listen in your sleep, you should pass easily. (And even then, people sometimes learn languages in their sleep so why not give it a try?)
Episodes are between 20 and 30 minutes, so you can squeeze one in on your commute or at the gym. You can listen to Dispatch in Depth pretty much any way you can think of—using iTunes, Stitcher, or SoundCloud on your phone or your web browser. A new episode is released every two weeks on Tuesday, and they’re not episodic so you don’t have to listen to them in order. Skip around and listen to the ones that really catch your interest; don’t worry about hurting our feelings.
If you’ve been listening to the podcast since the beginning, you might have noticed some changes in the last year. While Dispatch in Depth was originally a research podcast, we’ve moved in a slightly different direction. We still cover research topics of course—the Academy’s research department recently did a really great episode about the Data Center Dashboard and how the information there can help improve your center’s performance. We also talked with Kerri Hatt and Anthony Minge who were in charge of the EMS Trend Report 2020 and discussed current patterns in the profession.
However, we’ve also branched into more personal topics, based more on anecdotes and less on hard data. If there’s one thing emergency dispatchers can’t get enough of, it’s getting the whole story from start to finish. We’ve talked with Jennet Sullivan, a dispatcher whose parents were both killed in a domestic violence incidence, and with Kari Dickerson, a firefighter and paramedic, about the story of Freedom House Ambulance Service. Diving into dispatch means looking at both the way the profession should function on paper and how it actually pans out.
Is there a topic you’d like us to cover? A guest we should talk to? We’d love to hear from you! Email your thoughts and suggestions to dispatchindepth@emergencydispatch.org.
