The EMT training problem is a lot bigger than just the 200 people who didn't take refresher courses

adamg — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:05:49 +0000

Ray Vaillancourt, who has paramedic training himself, writes the entire refresher system is something of a failure:

... The fact that hundreds of EMT's blowing off the classes had no apparent effect on patient care is evidence of the irrelevance of the training. Very few EMT's statewide received meaningful refresher training, whether they spent the time in the classroom or not.

Those who signed off on no-show refreshers ought to be disciplined, but we shouldn’t stop there. This scandal is not just an ethics problem; it is a sign of a systemic education problem. The answer is not to crack down on attendance and ensure that every EMT serves every moment of their refresher "sentence"; the answer is to ensure that the refresher better serves each EMT so each EMT can better serve the community. Spending an arbitrary amount of time in a classroom covering material the students already know is not an effective use of resources. ...

EMTs

The EMT training problem is a lot bigger than just the 200 people who didn't take refresher courses