SALISBURY — Only six other emergency medical services divisions in North Carolina have received a gold accreditation from the Commission on Accreditation of Ambulance Services, according to Emergency Services Chief Alan Cress. On Monday, the Rowan County Board of Commissioners honored Rowan’s EMS division for becoming the seventh in the state to receive the honor.

“We set out back in 2021 to seek accreditation. We wanted an outside entity to look at what we did. Through that, we contacted an entity by the name of CAAS, and they look at everything we do. They looked at our policies, our procedures, our call reports, they talked to almost half of our staff. The reviewed hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of documentation that we say we do. They came in in early- or mid-May and looked at our trucks, they looked at our people, patients. They talked to the hospitals and the fire departments, anyone who has any dealings with us,” said Cress.

Cress said that the extensive vetting process that CAAS put their department through was so that CAAS could say with full certainty that Rowan EMS was doing everything that they said they were doing and could do. That process ended with the division becoming one of seven accredited organizations in North Carolina and 180 in the nation.

“It’s something I’m very proud of. Something that not any one individual in our entity could have achieved this, but as a group, we’ve got a lot of fine people, they were able to pull this off,” said Cress.

The accreditation process includes standards that touch on every facet of an EMS division’s management and operation. Standards include financial management, community education and relations, clinical standards and dispatch operations, among many others.

The process to get accredited by the CAAS begins with an agency performing a self-evaluation where they decide whether or not they meet the standards. After this, the agency can submit an application and CAAS will perform reviews of documentation and then on-site evaluations that consists of visitations, interviews and observations of facilities and procedures. Then CAAS’ Board of Commissioners, which consists of three people, decides whether or not to confer the actual accreditation. The board includes a former director of the EMS Office of the Department of Transportation, a former director of Mecklenburg’s EMS agency and an EMS consultant and lawyer with over 30 years of experience in the field.