Quality Assurance (QA) in the Emergency Communications Center (ECC) is like a mirror, reflecting back our strengths and weaknesses, our wins and our missteps. It’s a critical process, no doubt—but let me be blunt: if your QA efforts stop at pointing out mistakes or tracking numbers, you’re missing the bigger picture. Evaluation without evolution is just paperwork.
You’ve likely heard the saying, “QA isn’t about catching people doing it wrong—it’s about catching them doing it right.”
And while that’s a great perspective, it doesn’t tell the whole story.
What happens when mistakes are made?
When opportunities arise for correction, improvement, or constructive feedback?
The real challenge lies in elevating QA from being just a mirror reflecting the past to becoming a tool that shapes the future, driving meaningful progress and enhancing performance.
To truly serve your team and your community, QA must walk hand-in-hand with Quality Improvement (QI). It’s true that it’s not just about identifying where things went wrong; it’s about creating actionable solutions that empower 9-1-1 telecommunicators to grow and thrive. As someone who is deeply passionate about training, I see this as the heart of the matter. If you’re not using QA to inform and inspire your training initiatives, you’re leaving potential on the table. The feedback loop between QA and QI should be seamless—highlighting areas for improvement and directly translating those insights into meaningful, targeted training for your people. Without that connection, you’re falling short of your responsibility to the team. It takes both QA and QI working together to elevate performance, morale, and the overall effectiveness of the ECC.
Here are six essential principles for building and sustaining a strong partnership between QA and continuing training in your ECC.
1. Align QA Feedback with Training Goals
To make QA truly support continuing education, it’s essential to ensure that the data and insights gathered from QA processes actively shape the development of targeted training programs.
Start by asking yourself: what are the key goals your ECC wants to achieve this year?
Is it higher compliance on calls?
Greater efficiency and flow in call-taking skills?
Enhanced customer service?
More attention to detail, ensuring all applicable post-dispatch instructions are delivered? Whatever your goals, use the feedback and data collected through your QA processes to create a clear and actionable training plan to achieve them. Even if you outsource your QA, the insights provided should still guide the training initiatives you pursue for your agency. This approach ensures that every QA review becomes an opportunity to drive improvement, build skills, and elevate overall performance.
2. Foster Open Communication Between Divisions
As the title of this blog suggests, it really does take two! Strengthening Quality Assurance and shaping effective training in your ECC requires open communication and collaboration between these two divisions.
This isn’t a case of “East is East, and West and West, and never the twain shall meet.” To truly succeed, you must meet in the middle! You must establish regular collaboration between the QA team and the training staff, ensuring they discuss trends, challenges, and actionable strategies together to create a unified approach to quality improvement.
For example, if QA identifies a trend where telecommunicators are frequently selecting incorrect call types or neglecting essential scene safety questions, training absolutely needs to be informed. Trends moving in the wrong direction directly concern training, as they highlight areas where skill development or clarification is needed.
Some of the most effective training programs I’ve had the privilege to witness are those where the two offices operate like revolving doors, with both divisions collaborating frequently. While they are distinct, moving parts, they work incredibly well together when they align and move in sync. By fostering mutual meetings and open dialogue, the two divisions can stay aligned and work cohesively, driving meaningful changes in the right direction.
3. Use QA Insights to Customize Training
The real QA/QI love story lies in building on what you already have and using the feedback and insights gathered to make your agency stronger. Just like a muscle, strength is developed through consistent exercise, repetition, and challenges. In the ECC, this translates to regular, ongoing, and timely training. Effective training initiatives should address both individual performance gaps and center-wide trends identified through QA evaluations, ensuring they’re relevant and impactful.
Are you conducting monthly in-services, regular training sessions, or quarterly workshops? If not, why wing it? Use the areas for improvement identified through QA evaluations to design in-services and in-house training programs that target those specific needs and build skills to strengthen those gaps. Get creative with your training, but most importantly, make it personal. Customize training to meet the unique needs of your ECC and focus on the growth areas that matter most for your telecommunicators.
Remember, people naturally want to feel equipped and properly trained to excel in their roles. Thoughtfully designed training not only boosts performance but also reinforces confidence and pride in their work.
4. Promote a Growth Mindset Through Feedback
“It’s 2025! If the QA office still feels like the principal’s office to your team, let me be clear—you’re doing it wrong.”
If QA evaluations are met with dread and foreboding, then it’s time to reevaluate your approach. Respectfully, if your QA process isn’t human-friendly, if your team doesn’t fully understand what QA is, why it matters, and why they should care, there’s a major disconnect that needs to be addressed. For QA to truly help your people grow, they need to adopt a growth mindset—genuinely wanting to learn and embrace feedback. The problem in many centers is that QA is still overly focused on complex numbers and data, with feedback that is either non-constructive or poorly communicated. This misses the mark entirely. QA findings should be framed as opportunities for growth, not punishments. When feedback is delivered thoughtfully and clearly, it shifts the narrative: QA becomes a tool to empower telecommunicators, helping them develop professionally and succeed in their roles.
5. Make It S.M.A.R.T
Ahh… the classic SMART method – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. That’s key to how we track and monitor how feedback and training translate into real-world performance.
Remember what I said about setting training goals for your ECC?
Here’s how the SMART method applies to that:
Make it Specific. Know exactly what you’re targeting—what your center is being held accountable for in terms of performance. When designing training to enhance or improve performance, ensure it’s tailored to give your teams the specific skills and knowledge they need to do better.
Make it Measurable. You need a solid foundation, a standardized way to gauge whether standards are being met and if performance aligns with what is expected of us by our coworkers, supervisors, decision-makers, and the citizens and communities we serve. That’s why we have standards and protocols in the first place to serve as a yardstick to evaluate our performance on calls, providing a clear and structured framework for measurement.
Make it Achievable. It’s one thing to expect your team to strive for excellence, but it’s another to set goals that are unrealistic. When creating plans for continuing education and improvement, make sure they’re grounded in reality and achievable for your team to attain. There’s a vast and telling difference between a mountain and a skyscraper, yet climbing both is similar in one important way—you need the right tools. Asking your people to strive for something without providing the necessary tools and resources can create a major barrier to success. Whether it’s a mountain or a skyscraper, having the right support is essential to making the goal achievable.
Make it Relevant. The point of ongoing QA is that we’re always measuring, assessing, and evaluating our performance. We’re constantly evolving and maturing in our understanding of what we need to get better and more efficient. Timeliness and relevance are central to putting the “quality” in Quality Improvement. It’s about keeping feedback processes and training current and in line with what’s needed in the moment.
Make it Time-bound. As we set standards, create training goals, and work toward the purpose behind QA and QI, we need to remember to make everything time-bound. Set clear timelines for evaluations and ensure expectations are aligned with the changing needs of the moment. When we are clear about making sure that progress is made in a timely manner we prevent training from becoming this vague, indefinite task that may easily fall by the wayside. Having timelines set in place is motivation for staying on track and prioritizing reaching those goals.
Keep it Simple, of course – focusing on the people who are at the heart of this process. But yes, make it SMART! That’s how we drive meaningful, lasting progress.
6. Continuously Evaluate Training Effectiveness
The cycle of a healthy, robust, and successful QA/QI partnership follows a continuous loop: evaluation, feedback, training, repeat. Over and over, this process builds upon itself.
But an essential part of this cycle is creating space for follow-up and assessment.
Are the feedback and training effectively addressing the identified issues or trends?
Is the problem truly being resolved?
Equally important is ensuring that the QA process itself is evaluated regularly to prevent it from becoming stagnant or losing its impact. As we work to identify gaps in training and performance, we must also examine gaps in the QA process.
How do we keep it fresh, productive, timely, and relevant?
By constantly assessing the process from every angle and holding it accountable, we ensure it remains a tool for growth. Use follow-up QA reviews to evaluate the effectiveness of implemented training programs, ensuring they address performance gaps and drive ongoing improvement throughout your ECC.
Let’s put it all together now…
In the end, QA and QI must work together, with training as the essential bridge. It is the love story that every ECC deserves and needs vitally. QA provides the insights, identifying areas for improvement, while QI drives actionable solutions to elevate performance. Training then takes those insights and transforms them into targeted development that empowers telecommunicators to grow. Without this seamless connection, the full potential of both QA and QI is lost. When all three work in harmony, performance is elevated, morale improves, and the ECC becomes more effective in serving both its team and the community. Finally, keep the process cyclical—don’t overlook the importance of feedback and follow-up. And, of course, ensure that everything remains SMART—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Created by Samantha Hawkins
The Learning Center is pleased to give Samantha a platform to share her experiences.
Samantha Hawkins, a certified PSAP Professional and Quality Assurance Evaluator, has been a key figure in public safety communications since 2015. She is highly experienced in training others, reflecting her commitment to sharing her expertise.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article and series are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities she represents.