Right now in Deschutes County, officials are scrambling behind the scenes to address a labor shortage in emergency services and ensure every call to 911 is answered.

Dispatchers are being asked to work overtime and come in on their days off.

Police officers have been asked to handle less-pressing matters without a call to dispatch.

And more nonemergency calls to 911 are being queued up, to ensure all emergency calls reach a live call taker.

The Deschutes 911 Service District has had to get creative to attract new 911 call takers at a time when a Bend dental office is currently advertising a — presumably less stressful — receptionist position with pay starting at $25 per hour, $3 more than the district is offering.

There are currently seven dispatcher vacancies at the local 911 service district, and a striking lack of interest among eligible job seekers, said Deschutes 911 Director Sara Crosswhite, who lately has had to don a headset herself and fill in taking calls.

“We ebb and flow, and we’ve had dips before,” Crosswhite said. “I think the big difference right now is we’re just not seeing the applicants.

“And we need bodies.”

Most industries have reported staffing difficulties as more than 30 million Americans have quit their jobs since spring in what’s been called the Great Resignation. The dire consequences of failing to fully staff 911 has emergency officials thinking creatively to attract new recruits and keep calls from going unanswered.

Shifts at Deschutes 911 are typically staffed by five to eight dispatchers. There are currently 28 police-fire call takers at the Deschutes 911 Service District, plus four supervisors and four dispatchers in training. The budget calls for 42 full-time staff members. This is as call volume was up 3.8% in 2021 over 2020, though that difference is partially explained by the end of stay-home orders, as well as Deschutes County’s record population growth.

The district has even lowered the typing requirement for applicants to 44 words per minute. The thinking being most typists get faster on the job.

Deschutes 911 accepts lateral hires, though it hasn’t made any in a while. Crosswhite has heard the lack of affordable housing in Bend is a major barrier keeping experienced dispatchers from relocating to Bend.

“With the price of homes, it’s tough to move over here right now,” she said.

At the moment, Deschutes 911 is able to handle every emergency call for service. But in other parts of the country, staffing challenges have forced emergency call centers to consolidate with neighboring agencies, according to April Heinze, operations director for the National Emergency Number Association, which counts Deschutes 911 among its approximately 18,000 members.

Staffing 911 call centers was a problem pre-pandemic largely due to noncompetitive wages and benefits. Now, tens of millions of people have quit their jobs since spring 2021.

Heinze said starting pay in Deschutes County is actually on the high end of the range in the U.S.

“Wages and benefits are often comparable to jobs in fields that have less stress and more family-friendly hours,” Heinze said. “When you work in public safety, you work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Oftentimes, the pay is not quite as comparable. There’s a lot of stress in public safety, and along with stress you have a higher burnout rate.”

Deschutes County is hardly alone in having few serious applicants, Heinze said.

“We’re hearing that from many, many places across the country,” Heinze said. “A lot of the time, the applicant pools are made up of people just fulfilling their unemployment requirements, so they’ll apply for the position and then never show up for the interview.”

This may be happening locally, as Deschutes County human resources department has received 32 applications to become dispatchers. But of those 32, only one person has completed the testing portion.

It’s thought some job seekers are turned off by the fact the job cannot be worked from home. That’s not likely to change, but some employers in the industry are experimenting with allowing part-time shifts, Heinze said. The aim is to coax retirees back to work, or dispatchers employed full time at other agencies to pick up hours on their days off work.

Heinze said one major cause of the staffing shortage is the lack of a degree path to become a 911 dispatcher. It’s considered a skilled trade, one learned on the job, not studied in a college classroom. But to get creative, more agencies are attending college career fairs, scouring LinkedIn and filming recruitment videos. Agencies are considering hiring or loyalty bonuses, tactics more common in the private sector than government.

“A lot of these agencies have never to do outside-the-box recruiting,” Heinze said.

Though burnout and stress are common in 911, there also advantages, Crosswhite said.

Longtime dispatchers often report high job satisfaction. For an emergency dispatcher, no two days are the same. They can take a report of an abandoned vehicle one minute, and the next, be asked to talk a caller through CPR.

“One thing about 911 is we aren’t very good at tooting our own horn,” Crosswhite said. “It is a very rewarding career path. People who start in the 911 field, most of the time, they stay until they retire simply because they love helping people.”