Zion Recovery Services Inc., including its Perry office at 2812 First Ave., was recently granted a three-year accreditation by the international Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF).
Founded in 1973, the nonprofit Zion Recovery Services specializes in substance use disorder intervention, prevention, assessment and treatment. The company’s Substance Use Disorder programs earned the three-year rating in March from CARF, an independent, nonprofit accreditor of health and human services, after a rigorous eight-month review.
CARF-accredited service providers, such as Zion Recovery Services, have shown “their organization’s substantial conformance to the CARF standards” and “have demonstrated their commitment to being among the best available,” according to CARF.
The three-year accreditation is CARF’s highest grade, according to Brian Moorhead of Perry, a Certified Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Counselor (CADC) with Zion Recovery Services.
“When an agency gets a three-year accreditation the first time they ever tried, that speaks very highly of an organization,” Moorhead said. “Very few places, no matter who they are or how good they are, get a three-year accreditation the first time. It’s usually one or two years.”
Moorhead said Zion submitted its application for accreditation last August and was awarded the three-year rating March 12 after CARF completed a thorough investigation of all Zion’s offices in its five-county catchment area of southwest Iowa, including the cities of Atlantic, Adel, Perry, Red Oak, Shenandoah, Clarinda and Greenfield.
“They send out peer-review teams,” he said, “and they come out and look at our agency from top to bottom, including staff, all of our files — making sure we’re meeting confidentiality standards — our client-centered therapy. I mean they dig deep. This was the first time they were here. There were three surveyors, and they visited every one of our facilities over a three-day period. It’s amazing.”
Moorhead said when people are shopping around for rehabilitation services for alcohol-related or drug-related issues, the CARF accreditation carries weight.
“People see that,” he said, “and they know that we’re meeting standards and demonstrating our commitment to be among the best available.”
Zion Recovery Services offers a wide variety of services, including assessments, drug testing, intensive and extended outpatient care, residential treatment, an inpatient halfway house, Access to Recovery program, distance treatment and a variety of support programs in prevention, anger management, parenting, DUI courses, seeking safety and building blocks.
Among the newer service offerings is medication-assisted treatment (MAT), including opioid treatment programs, which combines behavioral therapy and medications to treat substance use disorders. Opioid addiction is a growing problem in Iowa and across the U.S.
“That’s going to give us the ability to do integrated care with people coming in with opiate addictions,” Moorhead said, “such as your pain pills, hydrocodone, oxycontin, percocet, heroin, fentanyl.” He said treatment drugs for opiate addiction include methadone, naltrexone and buprenorphine.
“For overdoses there’s also a drug called narcan,” he said. “We received a MAT grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, so what we’re doing is going to all the communities in our catchment area and donating doses of narcan. We’ve provided sheriff’s offices, police departments and EMS departments with doses of narcan, and we’re working to finish Dallas County now.”
Moorhead said the nasally ingested anti-overdose drug can be used not only with overdoses by addict victims but also with accidental overdoses by law enforcement officers.
“A piece of fentanyl the size of a grain of salt, ingested or absorbed through your skin, can kill you,” he said. “So picture an officer going out to a drug raid, and they get into a bag of powder without knowing exactly what it is. All of a sudden they’re sick and go unresponsive, and the other officer with them can give them that dose of narcan and save their life.”
Zion Recovery Services has been “touching lives and changing futures” for 45 years, said Moorhead, who has been with the company since January 2017.
The Dallas County offices in Perry and Adel have two-full-time clinicians on staff. Weekly walk-in services are also available in Adel on Tuesdays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Perry on Thursdays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
“If people needs an evaluation, they don’t need an appointment,” Moorhead said. “They can just walk into our office at, say, 8 a.m., fill out a few papers, and we get them in and out.”
For more information, contact the Zion Recovery Services administrative offices in Atlantic at 712-243-5091.
