The St. Tammany Fire Protection District No. 1 in Slidell has received reaccreditation for a third time with the Commission on Fire Accreditation International after meeting the criteria established through the commission’s voluntary self-assessment and accreditation program.
St. Tammany Fire Protection District No. 1/Slidell Fire Department is one of more than 300 agencies to achieve that status with the international program and the Center for Public Safety Excellence Inc. Ten years ago, the local district became the first paid, internationally accredited fire department in the state, and today, it is one of only three such accredited fire departments in Louisiana.
The Commission on Fire Accreditation International is dedicated to helping fire and emergency service agencies throughout the world to achieve excellence through self-assessment and accreditation in order to provide continuous quality improvement and enhance service delivery to their communities. It provides an agency with an improvement model to assess their service delivery and performance internally, and then works with a team of peers from other agencies to verify and validate their completed self-assessment. The accreditation model encompasses 11 categories, from governance and administration to health and safety.
District No. 1 Fire Chief Chris Kaufmann stated that the agency’s achievement of accredited status demonstrates his agency’s commitment to provide the highest quality of service to the community.
“We have also been able to use the Commission on Fire Accreditation International’s process as a proactive mechanism to plan for the future of this agency and locate areas where we can improve on the quality of the services we provide,” he said
