American Medical Response ambulance service recently earned national accreditation, the first ambulance service to do so in the Miss-Lou, spokeswoman Bennie Boone said in statement Wednesday.

In order to achieve accreditation, the service had to meet certain standards, according to AMR.

“That includes ensuring the quality of care from our medics, the reliability of our ambulances and equipment, the efficiency of our call-taking and dispatch, our involvement with the community and the soundness of our financial procedures,” Boone said in the statement.

The standards an ambulance service must meet in order to achieve accreditation are much higher than the state mandates, Boone said in the statement.

Accreditation from the Commission on the Accreditation of Ambulance Services is an objective verification that AMR meets “the most demanding standards in our field,” according to the statement.

“National accreditation means AMR’s patients, their families and caregivers can rely on us with high confidence,” Boone said. “CAAS accreditation is a national stamp of approval on the integrity of every component of our operation.”

The accreditation lasts through 2008, and according to a statement, only 105 ambulance services in the nation are CAAS accredited.

“We aren’t perfect, but as professionals, it’s our job to constantly work towards perfection,” Boone said. “Another benefit of the CAAS accreditation is that it provides yet another incentive for us to do the very best job we can every time we respond to a call for help.”

Jim Graves, manager of rival ambulance service Metro Rural Services, said his company hasn’t seriously considered CAAS accreditation.

“We haven’t really looked into it,” Graves said. “We’ve asked a few other ambulance services, and they said they looked into it and it wasn’t worth the expense it would cost to get it.”

If Metro were to apply for accreditation, they would likely apply for the same accreditation for which area hospitals apply.

“We would look at getting accredited through the same people who accredit the hospitals,” Graves said. “That way, people are doing things the same way.”