RICHLAND, Wash. – This week marks National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week, a time to celebrate the dispatch workers who help us during emergencies.
Inside the Southeast Communications Center in Richland, hundreds of calls are answered daily. Danika Mitchell, an employee there, was recently recognized for her dedication to helping people by being named the Dispatcher of the Year. “There’s 20,000 plus calls a month that we’re all kind of working through,” Mitchell said. “So in any one of those, if not a higher percentage, could be traumatic calls.”
Mitchell explained that being a dispatcher is challenging, especially when dealing with difficult calls. She added, “It’s just kind of been you’re kind of at a loss and it’s just kind of a tragedy that you just kind of live in through with them. So you’re doing your best to support the caller because it’s their worst day.”
Mitchell is advocating for more mental health resources for dispatchers to manage the stress that comes with the job. She said, “So any time we get kind of harder calls that are harder to manage, just kind of emotions, traumatic calls, they happen a fair amount. It tends to be harder for dispatchers to kind of work through that because we’re kind of stuck in our own mindset.”
Her efforts in developing a peer support system earned her the title of Southeast Communications Center Dispatcher of the Year. Mitchell emphasized the importance of these initiatives, stating, “So we’re trying to get to not only everyone in the state of Washington, all of the peer support to be kind of established and all the comp centers, but also have a peer support network, that statewide and then potentially even nationwide, if that’s possible.”
Mitchell highlighted the crucial role of dispatchers in emergency services, saying, “So, all calls, any calls for service, they come and they start with us, and then we’re kind of the glue between everybody else.”
