Portales Communication Center receives accreditation

After a process that lasted over two years, the Portales Communication Center has become accredited through the New Mexico Municipal League and the New Mexico Association of Counties.

The communication center (aka police dispatch), which handles calls for emergency services — including police, ambulance, fire and sheriff — was able to standardize their operating protocols by becoming accredited, according to Portales Emergency Management Director Keith Wattenbarger.

“Within Roosevelt County, we deal with a variety of different agencies; we deal with fire, police and ambulance, and we also deal with non-governmental organizations,” he said. “If you don’t have some standards in place, you can be doing it 14 different ways. We wanted to have a standard in New Mexico that was realistic and reproducible for all agencies.”

In addition to creating simple standards dispatchers can follow, Wattenbarger said that the accreditation also verifies that the standards have been approved by other agencies.

“When you look at when a university gets accredited or when a hospital gets accredited, what they’re really saying is that they’ve taken the proper steps to assure that the standards they follow are valid, and that other agencies place some value in that, and that you’re not operating in a vacuum,” he said.

According to Wattenbarger, Portales’ pursuit of accreditation came after the communication center in Hobbs received the accreditation, making them the first in the state to do so.

“Hobbs had really set their sights to step out and be the first accredited one on this. I just told (Accreditation Program Manager) Scott Chambers, ‘We’re going to be second. We’re going to put our application in, and we’re just going to dive into this thing,” he said.

In early 2014, Wattenbarger, along with other communication center coordinators, developed a plan to achieve the accreditation. Then, in early 2015, an application was submitted and the process of preparing for an evaluation was undertaken by Communication Supervisor Alexa Creed.

“There’s 108 standards that you have to meet, so one, it’s quite a bit of work, and I did go ahead and rewrite our policy, which took the majority of the time. It was kind of implementing everything slowly, so that it wasn’t so much change for everybody that it wasn’t undoable,” Creed said. “I think kind of slowly adding things in so everybody knew what they were supposed to be doing, and doing it the right way; I think that was the most challenging portion.”

From Sept. 27-29, an accreditation team sponsored by NMML and NMAC evaluated the communication center and found that, of the 108 standards being assessed, 90 percent had been met on the first day, Wattenbarger said.

“Of the other 10 percent that had to be fixed, the majority of them were fixed within 20 minutes,” he said. “About 10 (a.m.) the next day, they said, ‘hey, we need to talk to you. I thought, ‘whoa boy, that’s not a good sign.’ I got back and they said, ‘hey, you’re good to go.’”

After achieving the accreditation, Creed said she felt a profound sense of pride in her agency’s accomplishment.

“It’s a big accomplishment, especially for such a small place. A lot of people try to discredit us or say that we don’t know what we’re doing. It just proves that we do know what we’re doing,” she said. “We do a really great job down here; we have a bunch of really, really good communicators here.”