Training Program Skills Boost Emergency Medical Response

Paramedics from 16-month Firefighter-Paramedic Training Program can provide a higher level of care than EMTs

 

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Problem: With a growing and aging, population, Gwinnett County’s need for paramedics is increasing.

Solution: Training to a higher level in less time.

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Gwinnett County, Ga. is putting better-qualified emergency medical responders on the streets sooner by modifying its training regime.  

A new 16-month Firefighter-Paramedic Training Program, begun in 2014, turns out paramedics, who can provide a higher level of care than emergency medical technicians.

In 2015, Gwinnett County Fire & Emergency Services (GCFES) responded to 74,000 calls, 75 percent of which — 56,000 — were for emergency medical services, according to Phillip Merck, GCFES battalion chief-of-training. And the number of seniors living in the county more than doubled to 121,700 in 2015 from about 46,200 in 2000, increasing the need for more advanced life support services.

“Our department said why don’t we look at increasing our level of service at the very beginning,” Merck said, “so we’re sending out at the very front of a career somebody who’s already certified at a higher level without having to come back later to get those certifications.” GCFES is a “fully integrated” fire-emergency medical service; all its responders perform both duties.

For years, the county offered EMT training for firefighter recruits, and after eight months, trainees were certified “at the EMT intermediate level,” Merck said.

From there, it could take another 11 months, at least, to obtain paramedic certification through the fire academy — longer if a firefighter-EMT took a community college course, for example, while also working full time.

In its first two years, the new training program has added more than 150 certified paramedics to the department’s ranks, making it twice as likely that someone summoning an ambulance will get a first responder with advanced life-saving skills, he said.

While the terms EMT and paramedic are sometimes used interchangeably, paramedics receive more training and have a wider scope of practice in the procedures they can perform, medications they can administer and equipment they can use.

Training all staff to the higher standard has benefits both for the fire service and the firefighter-paramedics. “Typically, when we just recruit somebody who’s already certified as a paramedic,” Merck said, “their tenure with our department does not last as long as somebody who we built from the ground up.”

In the first “two, five, 10 years” of employment, he said the department’s attrition rate is about 4 percent. In the metropolitan Atlanta area, of which Gwinnett County is a part, it’s about 10 percent, he said.

The county has a population of 920,000. GCFES has the largest fire district in the state  and is one of only five fire departments in the United States with its own nationally accredited paramedic instruction program, Merck said.

One benefit for trainees who successfully complete the program is that they can be reclassified from a “firefighter 1-paramedic trainee” to a “fire-medic,” he explained, “which would give you a 17 percent pay increase, and also you would walk away from the program with up to 42 hours of college credit based on an articulation agreement with a local technical college.”

Merck attributes the training program’s success, in part, to “investing” in employees. “We invest in the forefront, because we know that investment is going to pay off dividends for years on end — for not just for our department but also our community and our county.”

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