ATTACHMENT B
Dispatch Center Assessment 2025:
Management Response
The City of Palo Alto thanks Baker Tilly for their assessment of the City’s Dispatch Center. This report provides valuable insights into how our Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) is performing and where we can improve to better serve our community.
The assessment highlights strengths of our Dispatch Center:
• Rapid 9-1-1 Call Response: Over 99% of emergency calls are answered within 10 seconds—well above national standards.
• Professional and Knowledgeable Staff: Stakeholders consistently praised the professionalism and local knowledge of our dispatchers.
• Commitment to Training: All dispatchers are certified and in compliance with required continuing education standards.
At the same time, the report identifies areas where we can do better. The assessment identified several future state considerations, focused on staffing, call processing, emergency medical dispatch (EMD), and training. Management has reviewed these items and responds as follows:
Staffing
While staffing levels are consistent with industry benchmarks, the PSAP continues to operate with vacancies, impacting capacity for training and quality assurance while managing peak demand. Staff will continue efforts to recruit and retain qualified dispatchers. Staff is open to a future assessment of staffing utilization to ensure a strong understanding of dispatcher workload and exploration of any opportunities for efficiency especially in non-emergency activities of the unit, to be completed as time and resources allow. In the immediate, dispatch management will maintain monthly meetings with stakeholders to continue to identify and monitor areas for improvement.
Quality Assurance Review of General Call Processing
Current staffing levels are inadequate to implement a formal quality assurance process for general call processing for all calls at the level and depth recommended in the assessment. In order to meet this, staff would need to add at least 1.0 additional FTE. Although there are agencies that do that in some form with the necessary resources in place for this, staff believe it can meet the intention of quality assurance through focusing review in the areas of concern identified in the assessment, specifically Emergency Medical Dispatch (EMD). Dispatch management will explore the feasibility of doing a broader quality assurance process in the future as resources and time allows.
Lead dispatchers will continue to monitor calls in real-time, as workload allows, and provide correction and feedback as appropriate. The dispatch center historically tracked its compliance with National Emergency Number A (NENA) call answering standards, a nationwide standard for call answering. Staff commit to working with PSAP partners to identify a call processing standard that is right sized to our Attachment B
Dispatch Center Assessment: Management Response
operation and call type. Although adoption of National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) as a call processing standard (not to be confused with call answering standards) for dispatch times is referenced, less than half of the US dispatch centers meet this. Staff recommend tracking call processing performance against this benchmark for information on daily performance; staff will establish a call processing compliance standard with PSAP partners.
Emergency Medical Dispatch
Dispatch management is committed to continuous improvement in performance, training, and process.
Staff recognize the criticality of EMD, especially considering the ongoing work to implement a single role service delivery model for medical response and the increased opportunity for improved patient outcomes. The City has enlisted an outside vendor to assess 25 EMD calls per week and provide detailed feedback. The dispatch center conducts its own internal EMD-Q’s monthly review of NOEMD and N/A calls as well. Next, staff are working to expand internal reviews to include all medical calls, not just those coded as EMD.
Staff have formalized EMD procedures in the EMD Policy, a policy within the Dispatch Policy Manual, to ensure consistent call processing and documentation of call types and dispatcher actions. This will serve as part of the training and accountability discussed below. Staff will continue to review these results monthly across all stakeholders to progress towards greater compliance with the EMD procedures.
Training
The existing dispatch training program incorporates daily assessment of trainee performance, coupled with timely feedback and remedial instruction. All dispatchers are compliant with continuing professional training requirements and receive formal feedback as part of the annual performance review process.
In parallel to this assessment, staff have been actively reviewing and have substantially revised the dispatch policy manual. The recent revisions address the observations noted in the BakerTilly Assessment. The manual now expressly provides for formal feedback, employee acknowledgement of that feedback, and a formal process for addressing performance deficiencies; this will enable supervisors to track follow-up actions and take progressive steps if improvement is not seen or maintained. Next, as noted above, staff commit to working with PSAP partners to identify a call processing compliance standard that is right sized to our operation and applied to appropriate call types.
Looking Ahead
We appreciate the work our dispatchers do every day to keep Palo Alto safe. This assessment gives us focus areas to build on that foundation and continuously improve our Dispatch Center. Staff will continue to work collaboratively across departments to implement the items discussed to strengthen the Dispatch Center’s operations for the benefit of our community.
From: City Manager’s Office, Police Department, & Fire Department