A WYRE Forest woman playing a leading role in the way police field emergency phone calls at their headquarters has been shortlisted for a Europe-wide award.

Chris Dillon, a call centre supervisor for West Mercia Constabulary, is in the running for the European Call Centre Awards 2005 category for team leader. Supt John Jones nominated Mrs Dillon, 46, who lives near Stourport.

He said: "West Mercia is the fourth largest police force in the country and the largest landlocked force, overall, serving a population of more than 1.2 million and dealing with 1.75 million emergency and non-emergency telephone calls every year.

"Chris supervises staff in the busiest of West Mercia's centres, handling more than 750 incidents per day, many of them requiring an emergency response.

"Providing advice, help and guidance to staff and managing the day-to-day demand in such an environment requires supervisors to be flexible, dynamic and well motivated. They have to be excellent communicators and good decision makers in order to ensure that potentially critical and life-threatening matters are successfully resolved and customers satisfied.

"Chris has all these attributes in abundance."

He added: "Chris has been a key player in achieving performance targets. She is 100 per cent reliable, an excellent communicator at all levels, well organised and highly respected by both police officers and police staff."

Mrs Dillon, who began working for West Mercia 14 years ago as a communications operator, has been a supervisor in the headquarters control room, at Hindlip, near Worcester, since 2001.

Before that, she worked in the Kidderminster-based control room.

She said: "My job is very challenging but very rewarding and I gain a great deal of satisfaction from improving the delivery of our service to the public.

"It is a great honour to be shortlisted for the award and I am very much looking forward to the gala dinner event."