D.C.’s fire department and 911 call center work together 24/7 to respond to crashes, shootings, medical calls and other emergencies.
But their top officials do not always agree, and some say the discord has hurt how well the agencies can serve patients and led the call center to repeatedly misjudge the severity of some calls.
Robert Holman, who served as D.C. fire’s medical director from 2016 to 2024, testified Wednesday in support of a D.C. Council bill that would put that director in charge of medical policies across both emergency agencies. He said a lack of clarity in the current law has allowed the 911 call center “to blatantly disregard” the fire agency’s oversight on issues such as a new dispatch system that he said required many changes before its launch.
Leadership of the 911 agency, also called the Office of Unified Communications (OUC), opposes portions of the bill. Asked by a reporter if there was tension between the agencies, Director Heather McGaffin said “absolutely not.” But she said that she would prefer to have a new medical director dedicated exclusively to the 911 center.
“I don’t want to be competing with another agency for time when it comes to initial training, continuing education, and quality assurance and improvement,” she told reporters.
The bill is the latest effort to address problems at the 911 center, which has been under scrutiny for years following a scathing 2021 audit and several highly publicized deaths that occurred after delays or mistakes that sent first responders to incorrect addresses. In 2024, for example, an infant died after a botched software update contributed to an approximately 15-minute delay in providing proper care, The Washington Post reported.
In addition to placing the fire department’s medical director in charge of oversight of the call center, the proposal would also codify training standards for its employees.
But the effort faces hurdles — namely, the opposition of McGaffin who, while opposing the idea of sharing a medical director, agreed with the push to boost training standards. McGaffin’s testimony was representative of D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s (D) position on the bill, a spokesperson said.
Policymakers must also parse competing narratives between McGaffin and her agency’s critics over the 911 agency’s performance and relations with the fire department.
Amy Mauro, a former fire department chief of staff, said while the fire department’s medical director offers feedback to the 911 agency, “whether or not his or her direction is followed frequently depends on the circumstances, convenience or politics, rather than the best interest of the EMS patients who call 911.”
David Hoagland, president of the firefighters union, testified that OUC staff frequently miscategorize the nature of medical emergencies, in many cases sending too many fire department resources to nonurgent calls, and “too often our feedback and input gets dismissed.”
Holman also highlighted several areas where he said the 911 agency had disregarded his advice, including by failing to adequately use a program that transfers people who call with nonurgent concerns to a hotline with nurses, who can call them a ride-share to a clinic if they determine an ambulance is not necessary. Diverting less-urgent calls could free up more resources for true emergencies, officials say. McGaffin said recent policy changes had boosted referrals to the triage program.
Holman also criticized the launch of a dispatch system in 2024 over his objections. He said that the new PowerPhone system “required hundreds of hours of Fire & EMS time to correct it prior to launch,” and that “many of the required changes were not put into place when OUC launched it.”
He said empowering the FEMS medical director to conduct oversight of the 911 agency and have final say over its medical policies could help correct problems at the agency. “EMS in the nation’s capital will never be its best without a highly functioning 911 call center,” Holman said.
McGaffin, who has been credited with making significant strides in correcting the department’s extreme staffing shortages, said she got sign-off from the medical director on the PowerPhone system and implemented all feedback from the fire department.
“What I would say is the medical director, the fire chief and the police chief sign off on all the questions and all of the responses” programmed into the dispatch system, she said. “So we work with them regularly. If there’s a concern, we’re always happy to answer those.”
D.C. Council member Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2), who introduced the bill and chaired Wednesday’s hearing, said it was her job to scrutinize the differing perspectives and assess what was true. “Sometimes we find the truth may lie somewhere in between,” she said.
Still, Pinto said the testimony left her “persuaded that we have to have certainty that the medical expertise is really being followed and adopted, and it seems to make most sense [for the medical director] to be the same person.”
The D.C. Council has in recent years added requirements for the OUC, including directing it to publicly post data on its performance — though some who watch the 911 system closely argue its transparency is incomplete and allege it does not post all errors it hears on the open radio channels.
OUC officials say they address mistakes when they happen but note that the agency handles more than 1 million 911 calls every year, most without incident.
McGaffin was appointed by Bowser, whose tenure as mayor comes to a close at the end of the year. The director said she saw stabilizing the city’s 911 system as her mandate.
“We all sit in our seats for a moment in time,” she testified Wednesday. “And my goal in my moment in time is to make sure that we have a stable 911 center … I want to make sure that it’s stable for the next person.”
The post After tensions, D.C. may give fire department more say over 911 center appeared first on Washington Post.
