The call came in on a Tuesday afternoon. The caller identified herself as a medical assistant at an urgent care clinic. She told me there was a patient on the floor. She didn’t know if he was breathing. She didn’t know how long he’d been down. She wasn’t sure what the address was — she gave me the intersection, then corrected herself, then gave me a suite number with no street address attached to it.
I was working with what I had. That’s what dispatchers do.
Units were rolling before the call ended. But in those first 90 seconds, I needed four things from that caller: location, nature of the emergency, whether the patient was conscious and breathing, and whether anyone on site had medical training. I got partial answers to three of them and spent the rest of the call trying to reconstruct the fourth.
That’s not a criticism of the caller. She was scared, she was alone in a hallway, and nobody had ever told her what a 911 dispatcher needs to know. That’s the gap this post is about.
What the dispatcher is doing while you’re on the phone
Here’s something most people don’t know: the moment your call hits the dispatch center, units are being sent before you finish your first sentence — if the call type and location can be identified quickly enough. The dispatcher isn’t waiting for the full story. They’re pulling the address, confirming the call type, and initiating the response while continuing to gather information from you.
That means the quality of your first 15 seconds matters more than most people realize. Not because a slow or confused caller delays the dispatch — responders are moving — but because the information relayed from dispatch to those units shapes how they approach the scene before they arrive.
The Incident Command System, which governs how first responders coordinate their operations, is built around the concept of a common operating picture — a shared, real-time understanding of what’s happening, where, and what resources are needed. That picture starts being built from the moment the call comes in. Every piece of information your staff provides, or fails to provide, becomes part of the foundation responders are working from when they walk through your door.
The four things dispatchers need immediately
After 30 years in public safety operations, I can tell you that dispatchers are trained to extract four things as quickly as possible on any emergency call. Your staff should know all four before they ever need to make that call.
1. Exact location
Not the intersection. Not the building name. Not the suite number without a street address.
The exact location means the street address — full address, with any suite, floor, or building designation needed to get responders to the right door. In a large medical facility or multi-tenant building, “we’re in Suite 204” is not enough. “We’re at 4200 Bryant Irvin Road, Suite 204, second floor, east stairwell” is.
If your facility has multiple entrances, your staff should know which entrance to direct responders to and how to get someone posted there before units arrive. Responders who can’t find the entrance add minutes to a response that’s already counting seconds.
2. Nature and severity of the emergency
Is this a medical emergency or a fire? Is the patient conscious? Are there injuries or just a threat? Is this ongoing or contained?
Dispatchers are classifying the call and determining resource deployment in real time. The difference between a patient who is unconscious and not breathing versus one who is conscious but in distress changes which units are sent, in what configuration, at what priority level. Your staff need to be able to describe what they’re seeing, not just that something is wrong.
“There’s a man on the floor and I don’t know what happened” tells me something. “There’s a male patient, approximately 60 years old, he collapsed suddenly, he’s unresponsive, and I can’t tell if he’s breathing” tells me what I need to start making decisions.
3. What’s been done so far
Has CPR been started? Has the patient been moved? Is anyone applying pressure to a wound? Has the building been evacuated or are people still inside?
This information changes what responders are walking into. If CPR is in progress, units come prepared to support and relieve. If nothing has been done, they arrive ready to initiate. If the building hasn’t been evacuated, that becomes an immediate priority alongside the primary incident.
“We haven’t done anything, we were waiting for you” is a complete and useful answer. What doesn’t work is silence, or uncertainty about what’s happening in a room 20 feet away from where the caller is standing.
4. Your name and a callback number
If the call drops, dispatchers call back. If units arrive and need clarification, they radio dispatch. Having a name and a direct number for the person who placed the call — or for whoever is now managing the scene — keeps the information chain intact when things get complicated.
This sounds basic. It’s not always. In a chaotic moment, the person who made the call may have put down the phone, handed it to someone else, or left the area to assist. Your staff should know that staying on the line until the dispatcher releases them is the right call, and that giving a callback number before anything else gets confused is worth the five extra seconds.
What happens on the other end of the line — and after
While your staff member is on the phone, the dispatcher is simultaneously running a parallel operation that most callers never see.
Units are being dispatched and tracked. The call type, location, and preliminary information are being transmitted to responding crews. In a multi-agency response — fire, EMS, and law enforcement — multiple dispatch channels may be active at once, coordinating a response your caller initiated with a single phone call.
When crews arrive, they’re operating on the information they received en route. If that information was incomplete, they arrive with gaps. If a caller said “there might be a fire” when there’s a confirmed fire on the second floor, units may approach differently than the situation requires. If nobody was posted at the entrance to direct them, they’re searching for the right door while the clock is running.
The first responders walking through your door have trained extensively to manage what they encounter. What they can’t compensate for is information they were never given. Your staff is the link between what’s happening inside your facility and what responders know before they arrive. That link is either functional or it isn’t — and whether it’s functional depends entirely on preparation, not instinct.
What this means for your staff training
Emergency training in most healthcare-adjacent facilities focuses on what staff should do physically — where to go, what to grab, how to evacuate. That’s necessary. It’s also incomplete.
The communication side of an emergency response gets very little attention. Most staff have never thought about what a 911 dispatcher needs from them. They’ve never practiced staying on the line, describing what they’re seeing, or directing responders to the right entrance. They’ve never considered that the words they use in the first 30 seconds of that call affect decisions being made before anyone from the outside world has eyes on the situation.
Staff emergency preparedness training that actually prepares people for real emergencies includes this piece. Not just the physical response — the communication response. Who calls, what they say, how they stay useful once the call is connected, and how they hand off to responders when they arrive.
The first three minutes of a 911 call aren’t the dispatcher’s responsibility. They’re shared — between the person on the phone and the person on the other end. The dispatcher’s side of that equation is covered. Whether your staff’s side is covered is a training question.
A note on what dispatchers are rooting for
I spent most of my career hoping every call would give me what I needed quickly. Not because it made my job easier — because it made the response better. Faster location confirmation means faster unit routing. Clear patient status means appropriate resource deployment. A calm, informed caller means the units arriving on scene have an accurate picture of what they’re walking into.
Your staff will probably never have to make that call. But if they do, the difference between a caller who knows what a dispatcher needs and one who doesn’t is measured in seconds and information — both of which matter more than most people ever stop to think about.
If you want to make sure your team is prepared for that moment, Adams Operations Group provides staff emergency preparedness training for healthcare-adjacent organizations in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. You can schedule a consultation call at adamsopsgroup.com to talk through what your facility needs.
Sources: FEMA Incident Command System Training Materials, Emergency Management Institute (training.fema.gov); FEMA National Incident Management System (fema.gov/national-incident-management-system); Ted Adams, 30 years public safety dispatch and EMS operations experience.