Demand management in force control rooms

Inspector Matthew Howes, Contact and Control Room (CCR) Inspector, Norfolk Constabulary: We’re often seen as the gatekeepers of risk because information that’s coming in often the first point of contact that comes through to the constabulary.

We have to identify the risk surrounding that using THRIVE [threat, harm, risk, investigation, vulnerability and engagement] to manage that and identify, ‘Is this a police matter? How are we going to respond to it? What grade are we going to respond to it on? What area of policing does it sit in?’ But it often will come to the constabulary through the control room first.

Rachael Tillett, CCR Supervisor, Norfolk Constabulary: So 999 calls come via BT, they get pushed into the room and we take them automatically. We can’t redirect them anywhere else. A 101 call comes in via our switchboard, switchboard finds out a little bit about the call and decides where it’s best to go.

We also have a callback system which the switchboard can offer callers if they don't want to wait if there's a queue, or we can ask them to use live chat or emails if they like. The live chat originally goes to switchboard, but it if there’s risk identified there, then it’ll come into the control room and a call taker will take it on.

We try not to move people away from digital, but if the THRIVE and the risk assessment says that the demand in the call queues is higher, then we might have to wiggle things around. 

We can also see calls come in on the call systems, mostly ambulance and fire. There’s sometimes social services, children’s services, adult services and the calls from them don’t trump calls from members of the public. And then we might use THRIVE to say, ‘Are we the best people to go to that job?’ And if not, we’ll have a discussion.

Each call we take, we have call scripting and that just involves going through some question sets to figure out the THRIVE. We will decide the grading based on the THRIVE, and that’s how quickly we need to get to the calls.

The grades we have are: grade A, that’s blue lights and siren, quick as you can, 20 minutes to get there. Grade B1, dispatch immediately, but it doesn’t need to be blue lights. B2 is within 24 hours, C, D, we’re not going at all and then a diary, which is appointment-based.

Martin Potter, CCR Supervisor, Norfolk Constabulary: Every day, we receive an email from the resource management unit that will give us the numbers of officers on shift. It will split it down by area. If another area was under, we can talk about moving resources around the county. 

The inspectors have a daily management meeting and they will discuss with the inspectors from other areas and the superintendent about what’s going on, on the areas where demand is as well.

Insp Matthew Howes, CCR Inspector, Norfolk Constabulary: It is a meeting that will be chaired by someone like a superintendent or a chief superintendent. They’re looking at where we sit with regards to things organisationally. We class it within the control room as the gold meeting.

From my point of view, they’re looking at: ’What does demand look like for the day?’ If there are any incidents of note that are going to have a major impact, and also if there’s any incidents that require me to consider around staff moves to meet the demands of the calls that are coming in, that’s something I raise at the gold meeting, say, ‘I’m looking to move some people from this area of the county to this area of the county.’

So the idea of the silver briefing is to actually get all the key players together to identify where we sit with regards to the deployments of the day, where the room is and understand those demands that are coming in and manage expectations.

It’s more for me to ask as the control room inspector to the other departments, ‘Is there anything I need to be aware of?’ And it’s done as a simple checklist, and it follows on from bronze briefings.

So the bronze briefing, where the supervisors will come in, they will brief their teams around the expectations of the day. The first one of the day will be the 6:30am meeting, which will be the early turn coming in. But we also have further teams that then come at our key demand time.

So we then come to the silver briefing. It will then be for those representatives to say to me, ‘This is where we sit with regards to the room. This is what we’ve asked to be done.’ Silver briefing wise, there are three.

So there’s the early turn silver briefing, which plans for the gold meeting at nine o’clock. You then have a late turn silver briefing that again goes into a gold meeting. The night turn silver briefing allows the control room inspector to have an understanding of where demand is with regards to the room.

One of the key things that’s been introduced is Calabrio. Calabrio took over from seating plans. It identifies the core positions that are required and it identifies the number of call takers that, based around demand, it predicts that we will need.

When they walk through the room, they’ll see there’s the board up there, which will have their seating plan in place. The different colours will represent where different people are, and hovering over the pink bit here, it’s saying the digital contact between 3:15pm and 7:15pm with a meal break at this point, so it gives them their job for the day.

The other thing Calabrio allows us to do is to look at predicted demand versus the staffing that we have. There are times it may show an understaffing based around demand. If I was looking at that as a risk and somebody presented that to me, I’d be looking to move some people from dispatch side across to call-taking side in order to meet that demand, so it actually gives me live-time information to manage live-time risk.