Your career: Working at an emergency ops centre

Working at an emergency ops centre is not a career that most young people will immediately think of, but it can be rewarding to be the first point of contact for someone in distress who needs help and hope.

The Netcare 911 emergency operations centre is the first point of contact for callers in need of emergency medical assistance and the high-pressure environment requires a highly skilled and passionate multilingual team. Many of them are women. 

“Sometimes we get children phoning in to tell us ‘There’s something wrong with Mommy’ and you can hear how scared they are. If they are home alone and the parent has a medical emergency, we are all the kids have until the ambulance arrives on the scene,” says sister Ayanda Mkhulisi, a registered nurse and Netcare 911 case manager working in the emergency ops centre.

“You need a strong heart full of compassion and respect in this career because people call us for help in their most stressful and vulnerable times,” adds Selinah Gauwe, inbound resource coordinator at the centre in Sunninghill, Johannesburg.

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“Our entire focus is on saving the life on the other end of the phone and providing help and hope to the caller in a crisis. When someone calls the call is answered by an inbound coordinator who is trained in basic life support and takes the details of the emergency. Behind the scenes, it is my job to locate and select the closest emergency care vehicle to the scene of the emergency,” Gauwe explains.  

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Working in an emergency ops centre

Mkhulisi’s role as the registered nurse on duty is to provide primary healthcare advice to people calling in with concerns. She is also responsible for coordinating the right kind of emergency care for each incident response or interhospital transfer.

“In life-threatening emergencies, we also guide callers through the steps of first aid to help the patient until the ambulance arrives. We are trained to be calm and professional in the moment, but the human side of the job can be intense. Before working here, I was a hospital nurse in my hometown of Pietermaritzburg and being the person I am in this role, I sometimes wish I could physically be with the person to help them in that moment,” she says.

“People need a special kind of care in an emergency and we have a responsibility to do everything we can to guide the caller on how to keep a person alive, often in very distressing circumstances. Technology helps and we can now use a video link to better assess and guide medical emergencies remotely until help arrives on the scene.”

The emergency ops centre has a special pause room for team members to take a private moment to regroup when needed in the fast-paced environment and the team has a weekly visit from a social worker for more formal debriefing. as well as access to resources including counselling and wellbeing services.

Zita van Zyl, deputy head of the centre, says that technology, compassion and healthcare are coming together to improve emergency medical services, such as through the use of virtual consultations to enable the team to coach callers to perform lifesaving CPR via video call.

“We handle calls in all South African languages and have a growing list of international languages through the many talented and dedicated people working with us. Once, a helicopter emergency services pilot stepped in to calm and reassure a caller who only spoke a European language.”

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Helping people through an emergency

She says it can be difficult for someone on the scene of an emergency to remember what number to call or to provide directions. The emergency call and geolocation functions on our app assist in minimising response times by connecting callers and ensuring we have their precise location so the emergency vehicle can find them even in remote areas or if the caller does not know the address.

“There is a perception that emergency services are a male-dominated environment, but this has changed a lot in recent years. Most of our frontline agents who answer inbound emergency calls are women and it is also encouraging to see so many more women entering advanced life support programmes.”

Van Zyl says she started out in engineering and always had a passion for science, but one day found herself in a situation where someone close to her had a medical emergency. “Although I was calm and knew the basics of what was needed in the situation, I really wished I had the knowledge to do more.”

Afterwards, the person’s mother said to her she should go into medicine and she changed her career direction entirely and went back to studying before gaining experience in road emergency medical services.

Gauwe says she always wanted a career in healthcare. “From a young age I had a love of helping people. As a child, I used to treat my dolls, wishing to be a nurse or a doctor. That passion grew in me and I had dreams of studying radiography, but financially it was not possible. I knew I was needed in emergency care and now I do not see myself in any other field, although I would like to further my studies.”

She says working in emergency medical services is challenging but also very rewarding. “When people need it most, we are their hope. At any time of day or night, we are here to help and this has made me love working in the centre even more.”