EMT-B training for PA school/jobs availability in South Florida

[donricardo]

Hello everyone, I am currently in my last semester of university taking prerequisites to apply for PA school. Before this, I am considering an EMT-B certification to be more competitive and gain some knowledge and experience of the heath care field. Also, many PA schools require a minimum of 1000 hours of direct patient care experience as a pre requisite to the program. I thought that becoming an EMT-B would be a fun and exciting way to fulfill this requirement, but from what I have read on this site EMT-B jobs can be pretty hard to come by. Some have reported searching from six months to three years before landing a job.

I found an EMT-B program at Barry University in Miami that I would like to complete and then hopefully land a job somewhere in South Florida afterwards. I currently live in Tennessee, however, and the thought of relocating to a more expensive state and not having a job for up to six months after gaining my certification is disheartening. Can any of you offer any advice or comment on the availability of EMT-B jobs in South Florida or perhaps suggest an alternative path? My ultimate goal is to become a PA, so the EMT job would be just to gain direct patient care and if I got a job, I would only be working as an EMT for one to two years. Are jobs for CNA’s, Medical Assistants, or Phlebotomists’ more plentiful?


To offer a little more background on my reasoning for relocation to South Florida is that I want to keep up with my Spanish language skills, as I believe it is becoming more and more important in the healthcare field. Before deciding to become an PA, I was a teacher and I lived and taught in Peru and Mexico for several years where I was able to pick up quite a high degree of fluency in Spanish. But as you can imagine, there are not many opportunities to practice here in rural Tennessee. Thanks in advance - donricardo

 

[luke_31]

Honestly you will be better off with finding an EMT program near where you live. The benefits of moving to speak more spanish will not be worth it for the paltry pay as an EMT you would be getting. Also it seems that florida is one of the harder states to find work at the EMT level.

 

[Frequency Modulation]

I live in South Florida, in Ft. Lauderdale. I know Barry Uni, but I find the Public State Schools, "Broward Community, FAU, Uni of Miami, Palm Beach State," are very good schools, and employers in Florida will actually give preference to these Public Schools.

As far as speaking Spanish is concerned... um, well... We speak a ton of it down here.

I'm not exactly fluent, but I'm pretty good. I studied latin in high school; I've never studied spanish, but after living in South Florida for the last ten years, ( originally from NY, ) Spanish is very nearly my second language. Everybody I know speaks spanish; just under half my daily conversations are in spanish.

 

[AzValley]

I'm not exactly fluent, but I'm pretty good. I studied latin in high school; I've never studied spanish, but after living in South Florida for the last ten years, ( originally from NY, ) Spanish is very nearly my second language. Everybody I know speaks spanish; just under half my daily conversations are in spanish.

I thought I was the only person how ever took Latin in high school Ironic too that it was in NY on Long Island.

 

[donricardo]

Thank you all for the replies. Instead of doing EMT-B, I may look into going straight through and doing paramedic or maybe some kind of accelerated nursing program since I already have a bachelor's. I don't want to go through a semester of school and pay all the money and then not be able to find a job, or have to search for one for six months to year, merely to get 1000 hours of work experience to then apply to PA school.