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The Denise Amber Lee tragedy inspires an evolution in training for 911 dispatch systems
How would you feel if you went in for your state licensing exam to become a dog groomer and failed? You studied all the styling standards for different breeds. You know your grooming styles for different breeds. You know how to bathe the dogs to perfection and are a nail cutting phenom! But you still failed. Forget about it...become a 91 1 telecommunicator instead! Your state requires no experience and no training! Sounds crazy, doesn't it?
My apologies for minimizing the service provided by professionals in the pet grooming industry, but our society is waking up to the fact that a well-trained and certified 911 workforce and its life saving capabilities deserve the same level of professionalism, uniformity and citizen oversight as many other occupations whose impact on human life is seemingly insignificant in comparison. From my vantage point of traveling the country for the last few years in the aftermath of my wife's tragic, preventable death, the answer is crystal clear. The overwhelming majority of citizens in this country believe that ALL 911 telecommunicators are already required to be highly trained and certified.
The Denise Amber Lee Foundation has been extremely busy this past year with the painful duty of being the horrifying example of the 911 system failure to emphasize the importance of a uniform 911 training national standard. The momentum for this long overdue missing piece of emergency response is gathering steam. In our home state of Florida, the already-passed Denise Amber Lee Act requiring 232 hours of training and passage of a state exam took effect on October 1, 2012....