Quality Assurance Is Vital

When you reflect on what’s changed in emergency dispatch during the past 30 years, many things might come to mind. But when you think about what hasn’t fundamentally changed in the profession, the importance of having a unified protocol system is at the top of the list—it’s only gotten stronger and almost universal. 

What accompanies protocol usage is an ongoing, rigorous quality assurance process. Without it, Emergency Dispatchers and their supervisors, trainers, and managers lack real-time visibility on their center’s performance. As Steven M. Carlo, then-IAED^™ Vice President, said in his 1996 article “Quality Assurance & Improvement: It’s Important!”, “Having an effective QA/QI program is absolutely vital to the well-being of a dispatch center.” 

What’s particularly noteworthy is that while the necessity of quality assurance hasn’t changed in the past three decades, there are more options than ever before to perform quality assurance for your center. As the Director of Quality Performance Review (QPR), my team and I are there to help you improve your center’s performance, especially when time and/or funds are limited. We strongly believe in continuing to bring a high level of human connection, making the use of QA findings more directly applicable to QI and CDE. 

As Carlo mentions in his article, any improvement process must be a positive, non-threatening, learning experience. This is where QPR steps up to the plate. We offer varying levels of assistance to centers—all in an effort to help you buy back your time to focus on the personnel development that flows from it. 

For some centers, the challenge lies in completing the recommended amount of case review. QPR ensures all players are spot-checked (as Carlo recommends in his article). We also offer center calibration, which ensures all agency QA staff are aligned—as a third-party we eliminate the possibility of internal bias—regarding how specific calls are reviewed based on IAED standards. We also go through a checks-and-balances process periodically to make sure that as the director of QPR, I’m aligned with our standards and best practices and held to the same standard of practice. 

We also offer each of our 319 agencies using QPR their own personal dashboard that shows agency reports using data we’ve compiled. Key information we can pinpoint includes the most detrimental Key Question/Chief Complaint/Minor Deviation elements broken down by shift and Emergency Dispatcher. Identifying these areas for improvement can be the first step in shining an improvement-based light on how these pieces affect your overall compliance and liability control. 

QPR is also there to assist with providing strength-based feedback for your line staff. After reviewing the feedback we provide, staff members will better understand what needs to be changed, why, and what we caught them doing right—which always seems to be found more and more as valid, routine QA processes continue. 

QPR is a ready resource for newly implemented centers and existing protocol users to get your agency on the right track through building good habits and eliminating potential problems. I believe just as Carlo did that “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”