Find Standards

This revision is intended to assist the ECC with establishing, implementing, and maintaining effective practices and processes related to handling requests for service by the ECC.

This operational standard places an emphasis on the need to effectively manage situations with critical decision-making responsibilities. It also offers guidance for emergency communications centers (ECCs) of all sizes on opportunities for employee growth, promotions and development of tomorrow’s leaders.

This revision is intended to support every reasonable effort by current ECC Managers to proactively manage public and responder expectations at the local level; support a positive working relationship with the wireless service providers founded on a fundamental understanding of the operational parameters of all wireless E9-1-1 service; along with influencing public policy, including regulatory and legislative action. The ECC Manager should also define, develop, and promulgate performance focused ECC training, maintain active quality assurance efforts, and understand the relationship between these actions and field responder efficiency and safety.

This standard seeks to serve as a guiding document to assist ECC staff in their efforts to prepare for a multitude of events as they create pre-planning and mitigation documents. This document alone is not meant to serve as a substitute to an individual agency’s plans. It is meant to be thought-provoking and should foster discussion and development of agency specific policy and procedure.

Public Safety Telecommunicators (PSTs) are typically the first layer of response to crisis-based calls and can serve as the initial layer of de-escalation attempts. PST’s must manage a wide range of emergency calls, often involving a variety of behavioral health disorders and conditions. Throughout Emergency Communications Centers there is a demand for skills associated with handling such calls in an appropriate, calming, and professional manner. To reflect the requests and needs for such improvement, APCO has published this standard, which provides a fundamental tool for PSTs. In practice, this standard is written to provide fundamental strategies and responsibilities for the agency, a brief understanding of behavioral health, PST responsibilities, and stress management for the PST. This standard provides procedures and techniques for improved responses for PSTs while handling a call involving a person in crisis.

Over the past generation, our industry has seen myriad changes in the way it operates, is structured, and the way personnel are trained. We have evolved out of necessity to keep pace with our technology driven world as our informational highways and capabilities become larger and faster. This constant evolution has placed new and unforeseen stressors of many natures on our public safety telecommunications personnel, and will continue to do so especially with the advent of visual technology arriving at 9-1-1 consoles in real time every day. These changes, along with the critical need of ensuring the mental health and well-being of all our PST personnel, are the touchstone for the creation of this standard.

It is inherent in the document that from agency to agency there may be nuanced differences impacted by State, County, or Local Laws as well as agency specific policies and procedures. Those differences notwithstanding, from a conceptual standpoint the information contained within the document should give any end-user public safety agency a well-defined blueprint for establishing the critical operational need in protecting the overall mental, physical and emotional well-being of our Public Safety Telecommunicators.

American with Disabilities Act (ADA) regulation requires 9-1-1 and other telephone emergency service providers to provide TTY/TDD users with direct access and an opportunity to benefit from the emergency services that is equal to the opportunity afforded to others. Many of the citizens that are protected by ADA communicate via texting and expect to do the same with a PSCC or PSAP. State and local agencies are being legally directed to identify methods to accept these text messages and must keep up with the citizen’s expectations.

This standard includes information to provide guidance and helpful material regarding the development, maintenance and deployment of a TERT.

The revision of this standard is designed to serve as best practice guidelines and operational models in support of effectively and efficiently processing these calls for service as well as identifying resources available to telecommunicators and law enforcement. This standard presents the response process in a logical progression from initial call intake through comprehensive data and information management.

This standard provides ECC management with key performance indicators (KPIs) as they relate to personnel performance measurements, accuracy, and quality of information logged or provided by ECC personnel. This standard identifies specific areas of personnel performance, which should be measured in order to benchmark individual effectiveness.

The goal of this standard is to provide fundamental key performance indicators (KPIs) inherent in all ECC work, regardless of size, services, or location. It also provides a list of conditions that allow agencies to further refine performance analysis and management, if applicable to its needs. The standard approaches this topic by designating mandatory KPIs applicable to all ECC environments; documenting conditional measures that allow for more detailed root-cause analysis; and identifying data elements necessary to complete the KPI.

This standard provides a standardized list of status codes that can be used by emergency communications and public safety stakeholders when sharing incident related information. Rather than changing their codes internally, each agency should map their internal codes to the standardized list. The agency is responsible for identifying how to map or translate their agency-specific status codes to the common status codes to ensure a clear understanding of the data that is being passed.

Telematics data provides an opportunity for public safety agencies to dispatch more efficiently, based on crash notification elements and specific crash data. Law enforcement agencies, working in correlation with telematics call centers, are able to work together to assist in the location of missing people, recovery of stolen vehicles and vehicle slow down to stop vehicles involved in criminal activity. In emergency situations, effective communication between the telematics call center and the local ECC is critical.

This standard identifies the minimum functional requirements that a computer aided dispatch (CAD) system shall include, broken down by public safety discipline. Also identified are the optional functional requirements that a CAD system should include. Attachment A: the Unified CAD Functional Requirements (UCADFR) provides a comprehensive list of functional requirements for CAD systems that may be used by public safety communications centers to assist with the request for proposal (RFP) process when they need to conduct a solicitation for a new CAD system or an upgrade to an existing CAD system.

This standard defines the recommended minimum components of a Quality Assurance/Quality Improvement (QA/QI) program within a public safety communications center. It recommends effective procedures for implementing the components of the QA/QI program to evaluate the performance of public safety communications personnel.

Standard nomenclature for FCC and NTIA-designated nationwide interoperability channels used for public safety voice communications. The public safety community uses spectrum allocated by the FCC and NTIA in multiple bands that is replete with interoperability channels. It is necessary to develop and employ a common set of channel names so that all responders to an incident know which channel to tune their radios to, as well as the band and primary use for the channel.

This standard is intended to assist Emergency Communications Center (ECC) Managers and their governing authorities to identify their current level of service capability. An assessment tool is provided to objectively assess capabilities of the PSAP against models representing different levels of preparedness, survivability and sustainability amidst a wide range of natural and man-made events. The second version includes the addition of “Day-to-Day” operations service capability criteria items and updates to “Survivability” items based upon lessons learned in the field since the original publication.

This standard provides PSAP managers, personnel, and technologists with a guide to begin preparation to accept and utilize this data. It outlines additional training that will be needed by telecommunicators who have traditionally made decisions based primarily on voice conversations, as well as the corresponding policies agencies must develop. With the opportunity to utilize streaming video, telecommunicators will potentially be able to visually determine the number and type of responders to dispatch to a scene, provide additional information regarding a fire scene and provide details often overlooked by voice communications, such as a gun on a shelf during a domestic violence incident.

Disposition codes are used by ECCs and public safety to identify the outcome of an event (incidents). These codes typically involve the use of numeric, alpha or alphanumeric characters that are only meaningful to a specific agency or region. This standard provides a list of common disposition codes for use by PSAPs and public safety when sharing incident information with disparate agencies and authorized stakeholders.

Social media is a common form of communication used by agencies and agency employees. This candidate standard provides guidance on the use of social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) for developing specific local procedures. The purpose of this candidate standard is to provide a consistent foundation for agencies to develop specific operational procedures and competencies while recognizing the need for each agency to customize specific procedures to their local environment.