AEMT/EMT-I to Paramedic

[OKparamurse]

This topic was brought up the other day at the station, and I'm just curious as to what some of your opinions/thoughts are on this - In short, in your experience or from what you've seen, do Intermediates or Advanced EMT's make better or worse paramedics than Basics? Obviously there's a lot of factors especially including the specific person themselves, but as a whole or in general, do they end up being better or worse paramedics than say an EMT-B with a couple years experience becoming a paramedic? I can see both sides, some EMT-I's perform a pretty extensive amount of ALS care which of course is helpful when they become a medic, but they're also more susceptible to the "been there, done that" attitude. Any thoughts or experiences to share?

 

[UnkiEMT]

I firmly believe that being an intermediate made me a better medic, and by extension that being an intermediate makes other people better medics.

It's not about having the experience with the skills, to be perfectly frank, there's not a single skill I had as an intermediate or that I have as a medic that I couldn't train a monkey to do. (Well, that someone who had any idea how to train a monkey couldn't...etc.).

What intermediate does is give you organized training on making the transition from an empirical practice of medicine (What is commonly, and I think inaccurately, referred to as cookbook medicine.) to reasoned practice. A difference I saw someone on here refer to as the difference between being a technician and a practitioner...a description I haven't quite worked all the way through the implications of, but rather like.

Now, before anyone gets up in arms about me claiming that basics only do cookbook medicine: Of course that's not universally true, a significant number of them don't, and those are the ones you can be pretty sure are going to go out for their medic some day.

 

[mgr22]

When I was teaching ('95-06), AEMTs did no better than EMTs in our paramedic program.