Calling The Town? Please Dial Direct

Joseph DelBuono, the town’s director of emergency communications, is encouraging telephone callers to directly dial any town agency that they seek to contact.

Telephone numbers for all town agencies are listed in the “blue pages” of the local telephone directory, as well as in The Bee Publishing Company’s Official Guide to Newtown 2002, which was published earlier this year and mailed to all local postal patrons.

Such direct-dial calls expedite telephone connections, Mr DelBuono said. In the past, the town had used a telephone switchboard to route incoming calls.

In the coming months, the town’s emergency dispatchers will be learning the techniques of “emergency medical dispatching.”

In that system, dispatchers who receive calls for ambulance service provide the callers with first aid instructions, explaining how to physically aid the ill or injured person until an ambulance crew arrives. The dispatchers will refer to custom-made medical references designed to provide direct, easy-to-understand instructions to the callers.

Placing direct-dial calls to the town would reduce routine telephone traffic at the emergency dispatching center in the police station, where dispatchers will soon be learning and using the emergency medical dispatching system.