Kim Ridgen, Associate Director of Accreditation for the IAED, discusses barriers and drivers of success dispatch agencies face when they are trying to become accredited centers of excellence (ACEs), including agency culture, timeline for the achievement, and protocol compliance.
Expanding the role of evidence-based practice (EBP) in emergency medical services is a matter of increasing importance to researchers and practitioners alike. However, this movement toward EBP has not yet been applied to one critical area of prehospital care: emergency dispatching. The primary reason for this gap is that emergency dispatchers (EDs) struggle to develop a research culture able to produce enough well-conducted studies to move toward true EBP. One starting point with documented potential for building the research capacity in a field is to develop...
Relatively few dispatch agencies using the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch protocol systems have achieved Accredited Center of Excellence (ACE) status. Despite ACE being the gold standard for implementation of these systems, no research exists about either barrier to ACE achievement or drivers of ACE success. s: The objectives of this study were to describe the barriers to achieving ACE and to identify characteristics that indicate success with respect to...