Communication Center Gains NAEMD
Pinellas County’s Sunstar Communication Center has received recognition as an Accredited Center of Excellence (ACE) from the National Academy of Emergency Medical Dispatch (NAEMD). NAEMD’s Board of Accreditation voted unanimously to approve Sunstar for this prestigious recognition. Sunstar becomes only the 34th such agency in the world to gain this important status.
Much of NAEMD’s 20-point accreditation criteria centers around the quality assurance program concerning Sunstar’s pre-arrival emergency medical instruction protocols.
"The first job was to determine where we were in relation to NAEMD’s protocols," says Director of Communications Jim Lanier, who spearheaded the accreditation application. "Sunstar was close to the criteria already. What we needed was simply basic tweaking of some wording and other minor areas of our procedures to bring us into strict compliance. Within two months, Sunstar was meeting the accreditation standards and we’ve stayed there ever since."
Continuing dispatch education requirements are also critiqued. This makes sure emergency medical dispatchers are current with changes regarding the delivery of medical care over the phone. In addition, the academy looks at the way information is retrieved from the caller and fed into the computer. It is very important that responding paramedic teams have an accurate picture of what they will encounter on scene.
Communication Center personnel were enthusiastic about the accreditation effort.
"The paramedics who do the call-taking responded very positively about the changes we instituted to become accredited," says Lanier. "To them, it’s patient care. It’s the same thing as treating somebody out in the field in the ambulance, only here it’s over the phone. The take greater pride in their work and they always want to do the best job they can. This accreditation helps to give them an avenue to do that."
The National Academy of Emergency Medical Dispatch is the nation’s leading agency concerning pre-hospital telephone care. Its ongoing mission is to assure the emergency medical dispatchers provide medical care that is realistic in a telephone environment.
