So full disclosure, I left EMS a wee few years ago, and there’s been some distinct changes in what skills & scopes of practice fall under EMR’s, EMT’s, and what we used to call EMT-P (now our Primary Care Paramedic, which again was recently changed to just Paramedic - as to make ACP & CCP acronyms less confusing…ha!!)
I was probably mistaken in using the term ‘training pipeline’ and should have used the term ‘employment pipeline’ instead…
So in Alberta, our ‘training pipeline’ isn’t an issue.
To become a licensed EMR/EMT/PCP/ACP/CCP you have to do the corresponding course including practicums, successfully finish the course and any/all exams, and then be successful at the provincial written/practical exams. (Annual continuing education obviously being required to stay employed.)
(After paying the $700+ to take the provincial exams…if successful, you then also have to pay an extra few hundred $$ just to get the actual license!! The license isn’t provided after successfully passing the $700 exam you just paid to write. Successful at the exam? Great!! That’ll be another $250-ish for the card…)
But at the end of the day, anybody who does receive the Alberta College of Paramedics license is very qualified to perform the skills included within that scope.
(That scope changes slightly on an almost annual basis as a new Medical Director is rotated into the position within AHS, and each one likes EMS to do/not do things slightly differently based on their own preferences)
Also in Alberta, I don’t know if that same saying of “If know one service, that’s just it. You know one service” really applies to EMS.
Police services, absolutely. It’s easy to see a difference in work culture between Edmonton Police Service, and Calgary/Lethbridge/Camrose/RCMP, etc because they all are different services with different leadership, seperated by respectable geographic distance, etc.
But with Alberta Health Services, all EMS falls under the province.
So while some shift leaders are better than others, and some station chiefs/managers are better than others, the policies both external & internal are the same province wide.
What I was meaning the other night about ‘pipelines’ in EMS terms - your hiring/employment process seems much more organized & straightforward.
You hire recruit classes, we run orientations every few weeks that can have 2 or 3, or maybe 8 or 13 people
(Those orientations are about specific policies, how to do the appropriate paperwork (paper & digital), how to use CADS, a review of EVOC, as well as meeting & getting familiar with hospital staff, procedures (where to go once we arrived with patient/who to talk to, etc etc)(There’s enough of a difference just between Calgary & Edmonton zones regarding incoming patients at hospital, it’s worth going over)
In the end…
- The training is good training, and anybody employed by Alberta EMS is extremely capable of doing their job very well
- As an organization, it couldn’t plan its way out of a wet paper bag. Employment with EMS was a disorganized disaster (we’re always hiring for a reason…)
(For example we would hire casuals & have a call list a mile long, but they’d never actually call any of them in for shifts. Even when a Code Red was clearly pending…)
(Or people would apply via the AHS HR website and never be contacted, no matter how many positions they’d apply for. They wouldn’t even make it to the interview stage - all the while Code Reds were becoming common, and publically were screaming for more EMS members…and still are.)
Running recruit classes sounds like a logical way to stabilize hiring, ensure members are familiar with some equipment prior to arriving at their posting/station (little specific quirks of different patient lifts, stretchers, etc) and I would think stabilize that profession as a whole out here
The ad-hoc way of what AHS has been doing over the last few years can’t be sustainable. (I’d assume anyway)
Special units are filled internally and have their own training pipelines here also
