Spring Break
URI EMS receives award for excellence on campus
Chris Curtis
Issue date: 3/26/09 Section: News
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At the National Collegiate Emergency Medical Services Foundation's annual conference, held earlier this month in Washington, D.C., URI EMS was awarded a "Striving for Excellence in Campus EMS" honor.
NCEMSF is a nonprofit membership organization that works to promote the development of campus-based emergency response programs.
The "Striving for Excellence" honor is part of the NCEMSF's recognition program of the same name in which member programs submit self-evaluations based on staffing levels, adherence to regional EMS accreditation requirements, vehicle and equipment quality and written operating procedures, among other criteria.
URI EMS Chief Shad U. Ahmed referred to the recognition, which stands for a three-year period, as a form of accreditation and the highest available from NCEMSF.
"It's a good validation of the tremendous effort we've taken for the last several years here to professionalize and just to voluntarily meet higher standards," Ahmed said. "It definitely feels like all the effort that we've put into it, all the work we've done, is worth something."
URI EMS was a much smaller organization when Ahmed joined the program nine years ago as a volunteer.
"When I first started we were not 24/7/365, we relied on the town services to cover us during academic breaks and our call volume was pretty low," Ahmed said.
Today, URI EMS is open and fully staffed all day, every day of the year and handles roughly 1,000 calls per year on campus and in the surrounding community, Ahmed said.
The NCEMSF named Ahmed "Collegiate EMS Provider of the Year" in 2008, but the chief was quick to attribute the program's success to group effort.
"The unique thing about our organization is that it's not just made up of one person, and I don't just say that, it's really true," Ahmed said. "We all kind of run this place together and it really is a true team effort and that's something that you don't really see sometimes at other places."
