In the wrong job

Something that has come out of the coronial inquest into the death of David Iredale is the absolute lack of empathy of a number of the phone operators taking 000 emergency calls for the NSW Ambulance Service. 

David, 17, died after becoming lost during a three-day hike in the Blue Mountains in December 2006. The coroner said David had died of severe hydration as a result of a "critical miscalculation" of the amount of water he and his two schoolfriends would need for a hike in the Blue Mountains.  However, it seems that the failure of 000 to respond in any useful or compassionate way to his calls of distress was a major contributing factor in the failure to locate him and possibly save his life.  David had dialled triple-0 six times and told NSW ambulance service operators which walking track he was on, that it was an "emergency", that he was hot, felt like fainting, couldn’t walk far and they should send a helicopter. His information, while imprecise on location, would have been invaluable to searchers with local knowledge, before they finally found his body in a dry creek bed eight days later.  However, each of the three operators who answered David’s calls before his mobile phone battery ran out treated him with indifference and even sarcasm. They scolded him for shouting, put him on hold, repeatedly demanded a street address, behaved as if he were an annoying teenage boy, and then neglected to record or pass on any of the information he had provided about his location to the police who were searching for him.

Yet amazingly, those 3 operators have suffered no consequences from their lack of actions.  All were still working at the call centre but had been "counselled" and "retrained" (it seems that some of this counselling only took place just before the Ambulance officials gave evidence at the inquest – I suppose at least they could claim to have acted late rather not at all?).  The Ambulance call centre manager, Superintendent Peter Payne, told the inquest last week, apathetic, uncaring, dismissive attitudes were prevalent in the emergency call centre at the time, and this had been a "disease" in the organisation.   So what does this actually tell us?

Who’s responsibility is it to manage the call centre to operate effectively and efficiently?  That includes recruiting people who are suited to the work, training them properly, providing decent systems and processes for them to do their work, manage unsatisfactory performance, including weeding out unsuitable people.  No point blaming things on anyone other than the centre’s management.  I’m fascinated how people are “counselled” and “retrained” to act like caring, empathetic human beings – personally I think empathy is a trait inherent in a person, you either are or aren’t, and its not something you can be trained to have.  Lacking in empathy – don’t work in a job where it is needed.  Seems to me the Ambulance Service needs to smarten up its recruiting and performance management processes.  Big failures.

Something the coroner said he was astonished by was that it had not conducted a review or analysis of its performance following the teenager’s death.  Just amazing incompetence in my opinion.  Obviously the Ambulance Service’s management is confident its performance is rock solid and they have nothing to learn from their mistakes (which they probably were in denial about until confronted with irrefutable evidence of them by the coroner’s inquest).

And I don’t hold out too much hope of anything useful coming out of the supposed “overhaul” of the 000 service announced today.  The statements by Health Minister John Della Bosca seem to indicate to me they are barking up the wrong tree.  It seems they are already blaming the systems:

"We also accept we must … address shortcomings in the Ambulance Service’s software and data base management and will immediately appoint an independent expert to conduct a root cause analysis into the systems and … the question of David Iredale’s death."

"We will also immediately address the limitations of the Ambulance Service’s existing software package and data base so as to more effectively deal with the taking, logging, recovery and transfer of emergency calls,"

Maybe that will help, but they need to look at the people.  Wrong people in the wrong jobs, with weak management.  Fix that Mr Della Bosca, because if you don’t I suspect the government will piss more money down the drain and fix none of the underlying causes that led to the mishandling of David Iredale’s calls for help.