Glowing reviews for Picture Butte EMS in report
By Nikki Jamieson on March 12, 2021.
The Picture Butte Emergency Medical Service department has passed their national accreditation review.
During Picture Butte town council’s regular Feb. 22 meeting, council was presented with the Ambulance Accreditation Report.
As part of the EMS department’s contract requirements with Alberta Health Services, their ambulance is to be nationally accredited by a recognized organization once every four years.
Frank West, director of emergency services for Picture Butte noted there was only a handful of organizations that do medical accreditation, and Accreditation Canada “fits well” for their service.
Accreditation Canada audited the town’s ambulance service against the Qmentum standard, which involves a quadrennial onsite visit. In October and November 2020, surveyors from Accreditation Canada had visits with the department both inperson and virtually to complete the audit process for 2020.
“This year was wildly successful – we only had a handful of things that we have to follow up on, but nothing that affected our accreditation,” said West. “Tip of my hat to all our staff for the work they do, specifically our EMS Team Lead Justin (Chronik), (who) does a lot of work on keeping on top of all these changes that comes from them and making sure we’re wellprepared and well-suited to meet the standards.”
West also said they had the “dubious, or meritorious” designation of being the first EMS provider in Canada to be certified under the new blended virtual model they had to implement due to the pandemic.
“We were a bit of the guinea pigs for them. It did take what is usually a three-day process and stretched it out over a month, with virtual meets and waiting for the case numbers to be low enough, when somebody could finally come here. So it was a bit of a stretch to make it work during COVID-19,” said West. “They were quite pleased with us, the surveyors that were involved – and if you read through the full report, there’s a lot of comments from the surveyors in there, they had fantastic things to say about our people and the service they provide to not only Picture Butte, but to southern Alberta at large, where our ambulance can be sent pretty much anywhere these days. So glowing reviews for our EMS staff.”
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