Pretoria - While the country celebrates Women’s Month, Netcare 911 has hailed its female team at the forefront of the helm – the emergency operations centre which is the first point of contact for callers in need of emergency medical assistance.
The high-pressure environment requires a highly skilled and passionate multilingual team, many of whom are women.
“Sometimes, we get children phoning in to tell us ‘there’s something wrong with mommy.’ You can hear how scared they are. If they are home alone and the parent has a medical emergency, we are all the kids have until the ambulance arrives on the scene,” said Ayanda Mkhulisi, a registered nurse and Netcare 911 case manager working in the emergency operations centre.
Selinah Gauwe, inbound resource co-ordinator at the emergency operations centre in Sunninghill, Johannesburg, said: “You need a strong heart full of compassion and respect in this career because people call us for help in their most stressful and vulnerable times.”
She said their focus was on saving lives and providing help and hope to the caller in a crisis.
When a person calls Netcare 911, either at 082 911 or via the emergency button on the Netcare app, their call is answered by an inbound emergency operations centre co-ordinator who is trained in basic life support and will take the details of the emergency.
“Behind the scenes, it is my job to locate and select the closest emergency care vehicle to the scene of the emergency,” Gauwe said.
Mkhulisi said her role, as the registered nurse on duty, was to provide primary health-care advice to callers. She was also responsible for co-ordinating the right kind of emergency care for each incident.
“In life-threatening emergencies, we also guide callers through the steps of first aid to help the patient until the ambulance arrives. We are trained to be calm and professional.
“The human side of the job can be intense. Before working here, I was a hospital nurse in my hometown of Pietermaritzburg and, being the person I am in this role, I do sometimes wish I could physically be with the person to help them.”
Mkhulisi said it took a special kind of care to assist people in an emergency.
“We have a responsibility to do everything we can to guide the caller on how to keep a person alive, often in very distressing circumstances. Technology is helping, and we can now video link with callers’ phones to better assess and guide medical emergencies remotely until help arrives.”
The emergency operations centre has a special pause room for team members to take a private moment to regroup when needed in the fast-paced environment. The team also have a weekly visit from a social worker for more formal debriefings, as well as access to counselling.
Zita van Zyl, deputy head of Netcare 911’s emergency operations centre, said technology, compassion and health care were coming together to improve emergency medical services. That included using virtual consultations to enable the team to coach callers to perform life-saving CPR via video call.
“We handle calls in all South African languages and have a growing list of international languages through the many talented and dedicated people working with us. Once, a helicopter emergency services pilot stepped in to calm and reassure a caller who only spoke a European language,” Van Zyl said.
There is a perception that emergency services are a male-dominated environment, but this has changed a lot in recent years.
“Most of our emergency operations centre front-line agents who answer inbound emergency calls are women, and it is also encouraging to see so many more women entering advanced life-support programmes.
“I started out in engineering, and I have always had a passion for science. But one day, I found myself in a situation where someone close to me was having a medical emergency, and although I was calm and knew the basics of what was needed in the situation, I really wished I had the knowledge to do more,” Van Zyl said.
Her career was paved when the person’s mother suggested she get into medicine.
“I changed my career direction entirely and went back to studying before gaining experience in road emergency medical services. Once I became a mother, I transferred to the emergency operations centre and realised the possibilities to help many more people from a different side of our service.”
Pretoria News