A gold award is "something good" and for the McKinney Fire Department, the award means it's one of the best at helping patients survive a heart attack.
McKinney firefighters respond to cardiac calls in about three minutes on average.
Watch NBC 5 free wherever you are
WATCH HEREThe goal is to get the person to the hospital as quickly as possible for the team there to do whatever is needed to fix the heart.
For their work, the American Heart Association awarded McKinney the Mission: Lifeline EMS Gold Award.
Get top local stories in DFW delivered to you every morning with NBC DFW's News Headlines newsletter.
SIGN UP Mission: Lifeline is the Dallas-based Heart Association's national initiative to reduce barriers to prompt treatment - starting from when 911 is called, to EMS transport and continuing through hospital treatment and discharge.
"It's a humbling award, shows we've done the right thing. We're doing the right thing for the community. That's what our ultimate goal is, is to have everybody in the community live a healthy lifestyle and get the proper treatment and care that they need and know that there are people within their community that will go above and beyond to get them back out on the street walking down the road again," said Charlie Skaggs, the city's chief of emergency medical service.
All 250 firefighters in McKinney are also paramedics, and the department prides itself on getting them the training and tools needed to save lives.
