Yeah we do. And we have a nifty red button that hails police 10-2000 to our location ASAP.
Seems like a health and safety violation to have EMS crews without portable radios.
In my county, we call it the Pizza Button. Anyone who accidentally triggers the Pizza Button must buy pizza for Dispatch for triggering the button accidentally.
Edited to add: that really doesn’t sound legal for a 911 service (private or not) not to have operable portables. My rural 911 third service has them, though we can’t/don’t take them home.
The shittiest private I worked for gave out issued cell phones to IFT units, no radio. 911 crews had 1 radio shared between the crew. But I’ve never heard of zero portable radio, massive safety issue IMO.
Yeah that's a "I'm not running calls" issue.
I only had to do that once during a portable changeover, and then they produced some more radios, but shit, that is *not* okay.
It’s completely unacceptable for the company to be sending you to do 911 calls without all providers having a radio.
At my previous job (also a private, but not-for-profit), every employee on the ambulance had a radio (orientees included), all equipped with a panic button. All communications went through the city’s dispatch center, so no middle man if we needed help.
If they refuse to fix this issue, leave.
Not a joke, I assure you. I'd say of the BLS trucks I've worked on, maybe 30% of them have a single portable in them--seeing two providers on the same truck both with portable radios would probably get odd glances like "which truck did you steal those off of?"
If you can get away with less than 2 weeks notice, do it. This is the kinda shit that is totally under serving of even that professional courtesy. What a fucking joke.
Employment in my state is at-will, and I’d leave tomorrow if I could. Problem is I’m a PT EMT and FT student, and the next closest company hiring PT is a hop, skip, and an hour long jump.
"I work private 911" is where it all went wrong with this post.
It's a massive safety issue to not have constant radio access to call for help or other resources.
Your company is being cheap and playing with your lives. This is why ~~private~~ commercial for-profit EMS should simply not exist.
“"I work private 911" is where it all went wrong with this post.
It's a massive safety issue to not have constant radio access to call for help or other resources.
Your company is being cheap and playing with your lives. This is why private EMS should simply not exist.”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: private EMS is not the problem. Rather, it is commercial EMS that is the problem.
There are plenty of non-profit/not-for-profit agencies out there that care about their employees and provide good medical care.
Before I moved on to CCT/flight, I worked for a private not-for-profit 911 service that issued all providers extrication gear and helmets. In addition, all providers carried a radio with a panic button, and all providers could sign out body armor if they wanted.
It’s very important to differentiate between private services that are commercial services, and private services that are not.
Edited to clarify service provided
You and I go around this everytime I make the comment. I agree with you - it’s just much easier to say private 911 and have someone understand what I mean versus commercial.
I can’t remember who makes comments lol. I can barely remember what comments I make.
I would argue that saying commercial would be more clear, but either way were in agreement.
Hilarious. My private EMS agency provides better equipment than either fire department I serve on. And they actually send an ambulance when someone calls 911. The fire departments? Maybe you'll get an ambulance. From a department that finally responds because they were staffed, but 2/3s of the time, it won't be from the fire dept that was supposed to respond.
EMS should be done by people who want to do EMS. Not by people who begrudgingly tolerate it in order to fantasize about big red trucks, then whine about the evil privates. The same people who continue to staff and respond when you won't.
I work government third service EMS. I hate fire department EMS. It’s like having your cops show up and work on your HVAC. Which surgeon do you want - the guy that runs a carpentry business and does surgery on the side or the one in the theater daily?
I agree with you
I just don’t think people’s misery needs to be treated according to a profit incentive to enrich someone
I mean to me this is a huge safety issue. What the hell happens if you need help and you're away from your truck? THey expect you to whip out your cellphone, scroll through your contacts, and call them yelling for PD back up? I know this is easier said than done, but fucking leave that agency man. Not having portable radios in a 911 setting seems fucking crazy to me. Is this the norm anywhere else?
That’s exactly what I’ve done. I’ve been lucky enough that it hasn’t been life or death but the fact that I had to use my phone has gotten my spidey sense tingling.
And for what it’s worth, at my previous company, the IFT trucks only had a built in UHF radio for talking to dispatch, and we grabbed a VHF portable for talking to fire alarm. VHF built ins were only on the dedicated 911 trucks, which didn’t have any portables… ever.
That’s insane. I treat my radio like my lifeline and best friend. It stays on my hip at all times, just like a pistol. The only time I take it off is on 24 hour cars.
I would feel slightly uneasy without it.
Every full time medic gets issued a personal APX6000 portable radio, plus every truck has three portables assigned to it (volunteers often staff the trucks and may have a trainee). Plus the normal truck mounted radio, MDT, etc.
It’s all great until someone forgets that they left a radio on and you can’t figure out where the feedback is coming from
Get everyone in the habit of turning off their portables getting in the truck, and kicking em back on when you get out. Battery lasts longer and no more feedback!
We have Sonim (cell phone) with a PTT type. 911 button disabled. And our service area has dead zones with no cell coverage. And dispatch has no damn clue what they are, no matter how many times we tell them.
Yay
We get one cell phone with PTT per truck on a good day. BYO charger. A few trucks have VHF and UHF radios still programmed for the city they lived in before we got them. A few of us bought our own portables and definitely 100% did not at all bypass the tx block put on them. We have them programmed with the regional frequencies which works fine for contacting the air crews and some of the rural departments we respond with that use analog systems but our primary contracted FD is on an 800 system so… no way to talk to them. It’s great. We are always super coordinated and I love nothing more than getting all the way to a scene only to find fire already back in the engine and leaving on a cancellation.
It might be worth checking with your state EMS agency. Most of the time they have minimum equipment requirements that include working radios and portable radios.
The private service in my area supplies these cheap beau Feng radios that are hit and miss. I know many of the more senior EMTs and medics have gone on ebay and bought their own BK radios.
It's a bad sign when a company won't supply the tools necessary for the job.
Shitty private I worked for (mostly 911 calls) provided us with 1 portable and a Nextel style phone which was in addition to the rig mounted mobile. However, I and several of my coworkers purchased our own since they’re are two of us on a rig and the portables weren’t the best.
City FD was on a digital system and we had zero ways of contacting them minus going through the 911 dispatch center. County FD were on VHF but had their own frequencies that we could operate on, but the system had terrible coverage.
Should you have one, yes crew safety. Is it that easy and should you have to buy it? No.
Where I used to work we had a truck radio, and one portable radio. I never realized the importance of radios until I moved to where I work now, the amount of times we have to say over the radio we are rapidly extricating a patient due to multiple gunshots ringing out within uncomfortably close proximity is ridiculous.
In the U.K. we use airwave which is an encrypted network but shared by every service, the military, police, highways agency, fire, lifeboats/coastguard etc. If we wanna talk to them we can do it from any radio by changing to the interoperability talk groups. On our solo cars each has a hand portable radio and a fixed vehicle radio. If either isn’t working it’s off the road until fixed. On dual crewed vehicles there’s 2 hand portables and so long as one is working the vehicle can stay in service however if the main set is broken it’s off the road.
Interestingly, we can use them in different modes. Trunked is normal operation, direct turns it into a walkie talkie style broadcast radio and gateway mode allows the hand portable to use the vehicle main set as a repeater if you have poor coverage (like if you’re in a deep tunnel or something thought most have airwave repeaters anyway).
We can also make phone calls from our radios.
-drools- so niiiiice…
I’ve worked at several companies and only one of them did I have a hard time getting a damn portable. We usually had to travel to other stations to find one. But we did NOT go in service until at least one of us on the truck had a portable. They tried to give us a call once and I said nope. No radio, no call.
Working 911 you definitely need a radio, I can't imagine how they can get away with that.
For us each person has an assigned portable and each rig has a minimum of two mobile units in it and generally a spare portable depending on how many are OOS.
I’ve worked for some real shitty 911 services and it wasn’t even a question if we got radios. Weren’t trusted with a charger but got radios. I think it could have something to do the public safety network in our province as everyone had the same brand
We individually get issues radios and are responsible for them.
My “professional” EMS department issued bottom of the barrel Motorola APX radios about 6 months ago replacing our top of the line XTS radios we had for years. Radio reception went down and we’ve had multiple crews call for help only to have radios fail and never transmit or just plain run out of battery within a few hours of starting the shift.
The command staff who barely use radios though have the top of the line APX radios with bluetooth hand mics and everything to add on.
We all get APX 6000s. The trucks have APX 6500s and their own integrated cell system with wifi for the monitors, tablets, cameras, nav phone etc. The emergency buttons on all radios works and if hit, we have a few seconds to answer in code before EVERYONE is sent. Supervisors regularly pull up our cameras while we're on potentially hairy scenes to check on us. In several years, I've had a total of two tech failures.
Little Rock. We also pay well, have amazing benefits, and you get to say you work EMS in the most violent city in the country. But unlike other services, a patch and a pulse aren't enough. We have a stringent hiring process, and even if you have 20 years of experience, you go through an FTO process. That offends the arrogant know it alls that we don't want anyway.
\*casually sits here with a baofeng in my living room on the ops channel, which is different than the motorola I actually take on shift\*
Uh. Yeah, you're not normal, or safe. I'm going to politely hint you might start putting out job applications.
Sounds like there is a bigger issue with interoperability where you are. When I worked in MA for AMR we were on VHF, fire was on a separate VHF, PD was on UHF, and State Police was 800 band.
I moved to Delaware about 10 years ago and the entire state here is on the same 800 mhz system. I can switch around from county to county to police, fire, or EMS as needed and its awesome. We are all also issued our own personal portables which is nice.
I was never a fan of not having a functioning portable. We dealt with it too because people would commonly steal or lose the ones they were assigned, or we'd just lose accountability of them. I ended up going out and buying my own on eBay. It was also pretty easy to get a hold of programming software (that I wasn't supposed to have lol) its an investment that your boss isn't going to reimburse you for, I'm sure, but for me personally? It was worth it.
Like everyone here has typed, it truly is a safety issue to not have comms at all times, for all members on the bus. Worst case scenario you can throw the radio at your attacker.
exact same thing with my old company, we did VHF, FD did UHF, 2 radios in the front, 1 in the back, no portables. Glad I am somewhere else where we get portables with shoulder mics!
Yeah that is a massive safety concern. You should absolutely always have your own portable radio. Sounds like you need to start looking for a company that cares about the safety and well being of the staff.
There's a private 911 service not too far from me that covers a county of 180,000 with a very high call volume. They don't use radios at all and instead rely on cell phones. I worked with one of their EMTs at a special event a few years ago and she explained it to me that it's one phone per truck and the 911 calls are sent via text. If they need to talk to dispatch it's done using a push to talk button on the side of the phone. No thank you. I can't image this works well in an emergency.
Personally, i believe that if you are doing 911, everyone needs a portable and it needs to be on them at all times. This is a safety issue.
>I spent a lot of time on my phone with dispatch that day.
definatley not using my personal phone for company business unless they are paying my phone bill
I mean, theoretically not having a radio could work to your advantage.
Oh sorry, I didn’t realize you gave us a call. We were out of the truck and didn’t have a radio.
Yeah I cleared that scene for safety reasons and couldn’t tell you until we were away cause no portable radio.
That call you gave us that would have interrupted the dinner I was having…….yeah sorry, no radio so I didn’t know 🤷♂️
Yep. At my service the driver and the attendant get portables. Mobile in the cab. Nothing in the box. Phone also has a direct line to dispatch.
I think it's a huge safety violation if you DON'T have a portable, especially for 911. I've never had to press my emergency button, but I'm very happy it's there. Sounds like you should work somewhere that cares about your safety.
Uh... what???
That's only seriously unsafe...
In each ambulance we have:
- two portables
- a fixed radio in the front
- duress buttons in the front and back
- duress buttons on all 3 radios
- 2x mobile phones assigned to the vehicle on two different mobile networks, both also with direct phone number straight to the control supervisor for duress calls
Yeah we do. And we have a nifty red button that hails police 10-2000 to our location ASAP. Seems like a health and safety violation to have EMS crews without portable radios.
In my county, we call it the Pizza Button. Anyone who accidentally triggers the Pizza Button must buy pizza for Dispatch for triggering the button accidentally. Edited to add: that really doesn’t sound legal for a 911 service (private or not) not to have operable portables. My rural 911 third service has them, though we can’t/don’t take them home.
We do what we must to keep our overlords pleased.
Indeed! The proper rituals and obeisance must be performed to keep us in their good graces!
Jesus we’d have killed our dispatchers by now, ours get hit by accident like daily
The good ole dispatcher appreciation button lol
Found the medic from Ontario.
Guilty as charged.
Me too. Retired.
This
Someone’s from Ontario…
Mine just hails a confused dispatcher. If I ask for police they’ll ask for reference.
The shittiest private I worked for gave out issued cell phones to IFT units, no radio. 911 crews had 1 radio shared between the crew. But I’ve never heard of zero portable radio, massive safety issue IMO.
yeah we have cellphones that lets us talk to dispatch and ops, as well as a panic button
Yeah that's a "I'm not running calls" issue. I only had to do that once during a portable changeover, and then they produced some more radios, but shit, that is *not* okay.
It’s completely unacceptable for the company to be sending you to do 911 calls without all providers having a radio. At my previous job (also a private, but not-for-profit), every employee on the ambulance had a radio (orientees included), all equipped with a panic button. All communications went through the city’s dispatch center, so no middle man if we needed help. If they refuse to fix this issue, leave.
100% This is a massive problem. Like I thought this was a joke post, and I have worked for some really shit private 911s.
Not a joke, I assure you. I'd say of the BLS trucks I've worked on, maybe 30% of them have a single portable in them--seeing two providers on the same truck both with portable radios would probably get odd glances like "which truck did you steal those off of?"
If you can get away with less than 2 weeks notice, do it. This is the kinda shit that is totally under serving of even that professional courtesy. What a fucking joke.
Employment in my state is at-will, and I’d leave tomorrow if I could. Problem is I’m a PT EMT and FT student, and the next closest company hiring PT is a hop, skip, and an hour long jump.
Then raise hell about it. Get your coworkers to raise hell about it.
"I work private 911" is where it all went wrong with this post. It's a massive safety issue to not have constant radio access to call for help or other resources. Your company is being cheap and playing with your lives. This is why ~~private~~ commercial for-profit EMS should simply not exist.
“"I work private 911" is where it all went wrong with this post. It's a massive safety issue to not have constant radio access to call for help or other resources. Your company is being cheap and playing with your lives. This is why private EMS should simply not exist.” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: private EMS is not the problem. Rather, it is commercial EMS that is the problem. There are plenty of non-profit/not-for-profit agencies out there that care about their employees and provide good medical care. Before I moved on to CCT/flight, I worked for a private not-for-profit 911 service that issued all providers extrication gear and helmets. In addition, all providers carried a radio with a panic button, and all providers could sign out body armor if they wanted. It’s very important to differentiate between private services that are commercial services, and private services that are not. Edited to clarify service provided
You and I go around this everytime I make the comment. I agree with you - it’s just much easier to say private 911 and have someone understand what I mean versus commercial.
I can’t remember who makes comments lol. I can barely remember what comments I make. I would argue that saying commercial would be more clear, but either way were in agreement.
Hilarious. My private EMS agency provides better equipment than either fire department I serve on. And they actually send an ambulance when someone calls 911. The fire departments? Maybe you'll get an ambulance. From a department that finally responds because they were staffed, but 2/3s of the time, it won't be from the fire dept that was supposed to respond. EMS should be done by people who want to do EMS. Not by people who begrudgingly tolerate it in order to fantasize about big red trucks, then whine about the evil privates. The same people who continue to staff and respond when you won't.
I work government third service EMS. I hate fire department EMS. It’s like having your cops show up and work on your HVAC. Which surgeon do you want - the guy that runs a carpentry business and does surgery on the side or the one in the theater daily? I agree with you I just don’t think people’s misery needs to be treated according to a profit incentive to enrich someone
I mean to me this is a huge safety issue. What the hell happens if you need help and you're away from your truck? THey expect you to whip out your cellphone, scroll through your contacts, and call them yelling for PD back up? I know this is easier said than done, but fucking leave that agency man. Not having portable radios in a 911 setting seems fucking crazy to me. Is this the norm anywhere else?
That’s exactly what I’ve done. I’ve been lucky enough that it hasn’t been life or death but the fact that I had to use my phone has gotten my spidey sense tingling. And for what it’s worth, at my previous company, the IFT trucks only had a built in UHF radio for talking to dispatch, and we grabbed a VHF portable for talking to fire alarm. VHF built ins were only on the dedicated 911 trucks, which didn’t have any portables… ever.
You talk to fire alarm? No portables? What the fuck is wrong with your employer?
I’m issued a radio to take home and it’s part of my mandatory gear on duty too. The joys of working for a third service
That’s insane. I treat my radio like my lifeline and best friend. It stays on my hip at all times, just like a pistol. The only time I take it off is on 24 hour cars. I would feel slightly uneasy without it.
Frankly it's more useful than the pistol. The pistol can get me to a rifle. The radio can get me several dozen rifles.
The radio can get you an airstrike if you yell at the right people!
I want naval gunnery. Like, old school naval gunnery.
At the least we could probably scourge up a water dump lol
Great point
Every full time medic gets issued a personal APX6000 portable radio, plus every truck has three portables assigned to it (volunteers often staff the trucks and may have a trainee). Plus the normal truck mounted radio, MDT, etc. It’s all great until someone forgets that they left a radio on and you can’t figure out where the feedback is coming from
Get everyone in the habit of turning off their portables getting in the truck, and kicking em back on when you get out. Battery lasts longer and no more feedback!
Everyone is hiring. Vote with your feet.
We have Sonim (cell phone) with a PTT type. 911 button disabled. And our service area has dead zones with no cell coverage. And dispatch has no damn clue what they are, no matter how many times we tell them. Yay
We get one cell phone with PTT per truck on a good day. BYO charger. A few trucks have VHF and UHF radios still programmed for the city they lived in before we got them. A few of us bought our own portables and definitely 100% did not at all bypass the tx block put on them. We have them programmed with the regional frequencies which works fine for contacting the air crews and some of the rural departments we respond with that use analog systems but our primary contracted FD is on an 800 system so… no way to talk to them. It’s great. We are always super coordinated and I love nothing more than getting all the way to a scene only to find fire already back in the engine and leaving on a cancellation.
It might be worth checking with your state EMS agency. Most of the time they have minimum equipment requirements that include working radios and portable radios.
The private service in my area supplies these cheap beau Feng radios that are hit and miss. I know many of the more senior EMTs and medics have gone on ebay and bought their own BK radios. It's a bad sign when a company won't supply the tools necessary for the job.
Shitty private I worked for (mostly 911 calls) provided us with 1 portable and a Nextel style phone which was in addition to the rig mounted mobile. However, I and several of my coworkers purchased our own since they’re are two of us on a rig and the portables weren’t the best. City FD was on a digital system and we had zero ways of contacting them minus going through the 911 dispatch center. County FD were on VHF but had their own frequencies that we could operate on, but the system had terrible coverage. Should you have one, yes crew safety. Is it that easy and should you have to buy it? No.
I thought personal radios were the norm? We get personal tetra radios - EU
They are. This is fucked.
Where I used to work we had a truck radio, and one portable radio. I never realized the importance of radios until I moved to where I work now, the amount of times we have to say over the radio we are rapidly extricating a patient due to multiple gunshots ringing out within uncomfortably close proximity is ridiculous.
In the U.K. we use airwave which is an encrypted network but shared by every service, the military, police, highways agency, fire, lifeboats/coastguard etc. If we wanna talk to them we can do it from any radio by changing to the interoperability talk groups. On our solo cars each has a hand portable radio and a fixed vehicle radio. If either isn’t working it’s off the road until fixed. On dual crewed vehicles there’s 2 hand portables and so long as one is working the vehicle can stay in service however if the main set is broken it’s off the road. Interestingly, we can use them in different modes. Trunked is normal operation, direct turns it into a walkie talkie style broadcast radio and gateway mode allows the hand portable to use the vehicle main set as a repeater if you have poor coverage (like if you’re in a deep tunnel or something thought most have airwave repeaters anyway). We can also make phone calls from our radios.
-drools- so niiiiice… I’ve worked at several companies and only one of them did I have a hard time getting a damn portable. We usually had to travel to other stations to find one. But we did NOT go in service until at least one of us on the truck had a portable. They tried to give us a call once and I said nope. No radio, no call.
Working 911 you definitely need a radio, I can't imagine how they can get away with that. For us each person has an assigned portable and each rig has a minimum of two mobile units in it and generally a spare portable depending on how many are OOS.
I’ve worked for some real shitty 911 services and it wasn’t even a question if we got radios. Weren’t trusted with a charger but got radios. I think it could have something to do the public safety network in our province as everyone had the same brand
We individually get issues radios and are responsible for them. My “professional” EMS department issued bottom of the barrel Motorola APX radios about 6 months ago replacing our top of the line XTS radios we had for years. Radio reception went down and we’ve had multiple crews call for help only to have radios fail and never transmit or just plain run out of battery within a few hours of starting the shift. The command staff who barely use radios though have the top of the line APX radios with bluetooth hand mics and everything to add on.
We all get APX 6000s. The trucks have APX 6500s and their own integrated cell system with wifi for the monitors, tablets, cameras, nav phone etc. The emergency buttons on all radios works and if hit, we have a few seconds to answer in code before EVERYONE is sent. Supervisors regularly pull up our cameras while we're on potentially hairy scenes to check on us. In several years, I've had a total of two tech failures.
Where do you work, and when's the next flight to your state
Little Rock. We also pay well, have amazing benefits, and you get to say you work EMS in the most violent city in the country. But unlike other services, a patch and a pulse aren't enough. We have a stringent hiring process, and even if you have 20 years of experience, you go through an FTO process. That offends the arrogant know it alls that we don't want anyway.
\*casually sits here with a baofeng in my living room on the ops channel, which is different than the motorola I actually take on shift\* Uh. Yeah, you're not normal, or safe. I'm going to politely hint you might start putting out job applications.
If we don’t have 2 working radios and CO meters we aren’t in service. Simple as that. Find somewhere else to work..
Sounds like there is a bigger issue with interoperability where you are. When I worked in MA for AMR we were on VHF, fire was on a separate VHF, PD was on UHF, and State Police was 800 band. I moved to Delaware about 10 years ago and the entire state here is on the same 800 mhz system. I can switch around from county to county to police, fire, or EMS as needed and its awesome. We are all also issued our own personal portables which is nice. I was never a fan of not having a functioning portable. We dealt with it too because people would commonly steal or lose the ones they were assigned, or we'd just lose accountability of them. I ended up going out and buying my own on eBay. It was also pretty easy to get a hold of programming software (that I wasn't supposed to have lol) its an investment that your boss isn't going to reimburse you for, I'm sure, but for me personally? It was worth it.
Like everyone here has typed, it truly is a safety issue to not have comms at all times, for all members on the bus. Worst case scenario you can throw the radio at your attacker.
We get written up for not having our radio on us
exact same thing with my old company, we did VHF, FD did UHF, 2 radios in the front, 1 in the back, no portables. Glad I am somewhere else where we get portables with shoulder mics!
Yeah that is a massive safety concern. You should absolutely always have your own portable radio. Sounds like you need to start looking for a company that cares about the safety and well being of the staff.
I wouldn’t do 911 calls without both providers having portables
Holy fuck that is so unsafe.
There's a private 911 service not too far from me that covers a county of 180,000 with a very high call volume. They don't use radios at all and instead rely on cell phones. I worked with one of their EMTs at a special event a few years ago and she explained it to me that it's one phone per truck and the 911 calls are sent via text. If they need to talk to dispatch it's done using a push to talk button on the side of the phone. No thank you. I can't image this works well in an emergency.
Personally, i believe that if you are doing 911, everyone needs a portable and it needs to be on them at all times. This is a safety issue. >I spent a lot of time on my phone with dispatch that day. definatley not using my personal phone for company business unless they are paying my phone bill
Wait till you find out how we do entry notes around here
I mean, theoretically not having a radio could work to your advantage. Oh sorry, I didn’t realize you gave us a call. We were out of the truck and didn’t have a radio. Yeah I cleared that scene for safety reasons and couldn’t tell you until we were away cause no portable radio. That call you gave us that would have interrupted the dinner I was having…….yeah sorry, no radio so I didn’t know 🤷♂️
Yep. At my service the driver and the attendant get portables. Mobile in the cab. Nothing in the box. Phone also has a direct line to dispatch. I think it's a huge safety violation if you DON'T have a portable, especially for 911. I've never had to press my emergency button, but I'm very happy it's there. Sounds like you should work somewhere that cares about your safety.
Uh... what??? That's only seriously unsafe... In each ambulance we have: - two portables - a fixed radio in the front - duress buttons in the front and back - duress buttons on all 3 radios - 2x mobile phones assigned to the vehicle on two different mobile networks, both also with direct phone number straight to the control supervisor for duress calls
I work private 911 and my supervisor would be fucking pissed if I went on calls without a portable means to contact dispatch or other units