Occupational Experiences of Public Safety Communicators During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Qualitative Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic created an unprecedented global crisis as the virus affected many, and lives were restricted by public health measures. Public Safety Communicators (PSCs; e.g., 9-1-1 operators, call-takers, dispatchers) faced unique challenges in their work as the pandemic progressed with shifting workloads as well as requirements to continue to work and to work in-person. Moreover, PSCs were the person to call when there was a medical or public safety emergency during the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given extant literature already suggesting PSCs have a high prevalence of mental health disorders, we conducted an online survey of PSCs ( n = 333) in Canada striving to interpret the nuance in PSCs experiences, with a focus on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Responses to open-ended items were coded into four areas impacted: self-reported increase in stress, specific operational stresses and organizational stresses experienced by PSC during COVID-19, and the COVID-19 precautions implemented in communicator workplaces. Lessons learned from PSC experiences can be harnessed to better support essential crisis responses while maintaining and supporting employee wellness.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".