Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Arkansas Children's Hospital Wins Fire Safety Award

Arkansas Children's Hospital (ACH) has won the 1999 Ray Carnahan Award for excellence in fire safety community education.

Established by the Arkansas Fire Prevention Commission in 1997, the award is named for the current State Fire Marshall and is the most notable award of its kind in the state.

The award was presented August 14 to Christie Berner, senior vice president of patient care services and Jimmy Parks, ACH Burn Center outreach coordinator, at the 1999 Joint Conference of the Arkansas State Firefighters Association and the Arkansas Fire Chiefs Association.

The award recognizes ACH for its outstanding services to the communities of Arkansas in the area of fire and burn safety and prevention. The Community Outreach Department and the Burn Center's outreach coordinator offer several programs: the Fire Safety House, which was used to teach more than 30,000 children last year how to appropriately respond should their home catch on fire; burn prevention classes presented to over 10,000 junior high students and 1,000 adults by burn center nurses last year; and thousands of educational materials presented to teachers, firefighters and others to help them teach fire safety and burn prevention.

The newest program recently initiated by ACH is the statewide Juvenile Firesetter Intervention Program in cooperation with fire departments around Arkansas. This program aims to reach the young person who is showing tendencies to play with fire. Its goal is to educate and redirect these youngsters in order to prevent them from hurting themselves and others.

"We are very proud to have won this honor," said Jonathan Bates, M.D., president and CEO of ACH. "The employees involved in these programs work very hard to reach as many people as they can about fire safety and burn prevention. If our efforts succeed in keeping just one person from suffering a devastating and life-threatening burn, we will have done our job."

To schedule fire safety and burn prevention for your class, group or meeting, call the Arkansas Children's Hospital Community Outreach office at 501-320-5437.