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I really think this speaks for it's self. . .
Indiana Paramedic Opens EMS School
- Frank Denzler, The Rushville Republican, Ind.
Jun. 25--On any given night a number of local residents, those from nearby and some from not so near counties may be found in the 100 block of West First Street in downtown Rushville. There is no need for alarm, they are simply taking a break from studies at the Tri-County Medical Academy, one of the county's newest businesses.
Director of the school and Fayette County resident Bill Hufford is no stranger to the emergency medical field, having logged more than 28 years of in-field medical care and more than 20 years as an instructor.
Originally from North Carolina, Hufford became an EMT in 1981 and later a paramedic.
A four year stint in the U.S. Navy, from 1987 through 1991, found Hufford serving during both Desert Storm and Desert Shield where he was tapped to be in division school as a trainer and became a primary instructor teaching military EMT training.
"I have basically been in the medical field and working for ambulance services my entire adult life," Hufford said.
After serving his country, Hufford settled in Ohio for a couple of years prior to relocating to Indiana and becoming the Director of EMS in Logansport. That move was followed to his current residence in Connersville, where he served as a flight medic on an air ambulance and followed that by again returning to the field and working for an ambulance service.
"About three years ago, I simply got tired of working for everyone else and wanted to go into business for myself. That is when I opened my own school, the Tri-County Training Academy," Hufford said.
The operation began in the converted garage of his home, to later holding classes in fire department training rooms and has since expanded to its current home in Rushville.
The medical training school currently has an average enrollment of nearly 150 students gaining instruction at various levels of in-field medical care: EMT-B, EMT-Advance and EMT-paramedic.
"I don't think that a lot of people realize the capabilities of an EMT or that of a paramedic. During a life threatening emergency such as difficulty breathing or a heart attack the paramedic ambulance has the capability to administer the exact same medications as that of an emergency room, the only difference is that they are administered right at the scene and not 20 to 30 minutes later at the hospital. That definitely increases the chance for survival. We more or less bring the emergency room to the patient," he said.
Completing the course is just one step in the process of becoming an EMT or paramedic. Specified ride time with trained medical personnel on an ambulance, hospital emergency room clinical time and successfully passing the State of Indiana exam are also required.
"Once the classroom instruction and the other requirements are met individuals are eligible to sit for the state boards. Just like nursing you are not a nurse when you complete nursing school, you still have to pass the state boards," Hufford said.
The instructor said Tri-County Training Academy has a high pass rate for those taking the state exam.
"We are an Indiana Department of Homeland Security advanced training center and offer the only state-based program that teaches the tactic-medic program. Once that training is complete it allows the EMT or paramedic to go with an area SWAT Team and act as part of that team. It also entitles the individual to be on an entry team at a state prison," the instructor said.
When asked about his concerns regarding opening a business in the current economic climate Hufford said that quality trained medical personnel have been, are and will always be needed.
"No matter how bad the economy is there are always going to be those individuals that are sick or become injured. The fields of EMTs and paramedics are actually evolving and growing. You will now find them working in emergency rooms at hospitals and medical clinics. Their rolls are really expanding," Hufford said.
Indiana Paramedic Opens EMS School
- Frank Denzler, The Rushville Republican, Ind.
Jun. 25--On any given night a number of local residents, those from nearby and some from not so near counties may be found in the 100 block of West First Street in downtown Rushville. There is no need for alarm, they are simply taking a break from studies at the Tri-County Medical Academy, one of the county's newest businesses.
Director of the school and Fayette County resident Bill Hufford is no stranger to the emergency medical field, having logged more than 28 years of in-field medical care and more than 20 years as an instructor.
Originally from North Carolina, Hufford became an EMT in 1981 and later a paramedic.
A four year stint in the U.S. Navy, from 1987 through 1991, found Hufford serving during both Desert Storm and Desert Shield where he was tapped to be in division school as a trainer and became a primary instructor teaching military EMT training.
"I have basically been in the medical field and working for ambulance services my entire adult life," Hufford said.
After serving his country, Hufford settled in Ohio for a couple of years prior to relocating to Indiana and becoming the Director of EMS in Logansport. That move was followed to his current residence in Connersville, where he served as a flight medic on an air ambulance and followed that by again returning to the field and working for an ambulance service.
"About three years ago, I simply got tired of working for everyone else and wanted to go into business for myself. That is when I opened my own school, the Tri-County Training Academy," Hufford said.
The operation began in the converted garage of his home, to later holding classes in fire department training rooms and has since expanded to its current home in Rushville.
The medical training school currently has an average enrollment of nearly 150 students gaining instruction at various levels of in-field medical care: EMT-B, EMT-Advance and EMT-paramedic.
"I don't think that a lot of people realize the capabilities of an EMT or that of a paramedic. During a life threatening emergency such as difficulty breathing or a heart attack the paramedic ambulance has the capability to administer the exact same medications as that of an emergency room, the only difference is that they are administered right at the scene and not 20 to 30 minutes later at the hospital. That definitely increases the chance for survival. We more or less bring the emergency room to the patient," he said.
Completing the course is just one step in the process of becoming an EMT or paramedic. Specified ride time with trained medical personnel on an ambulance, hospital emergency room clinical time and successfully passing the State of Indiana exam are also required.
"Once the classroom instruction and the other requirements are met individuals are eligible to sit for the state boards. Just like nursing you are not a nurse when you complete nursing school, you still have to pass the state boards," Hufford said.
The instructor said Tri-County Training Academy has a high pass rate for those taking the state exam.
"We are an Indiana Department of Homeland Security advanced training center and offer the only state-based program that teaches the tactic-medic program. Once that training is complete it allows the EMT or paramedic to go with an area SWAT Team and act as part of that team. It also entitles the individual to be on an entry team at a state prison," the instructor said.
When asked about his concerns regarding opening a business in the current economic climate Hufford said that quality trained medical personnel have been, are and will always be needed.
"No matter how bad the economy is there are always going to be those individuals that are sick or become injured. The fields of EMTs and paramedics are actually evolving and growing. You will now find them working in emergency rooms at hospitals and medical clinics. Their rolls are really expanding," Hufford said.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Ben Waller on -
Gul,
Nursing is the closest model to EMS, and that's why several of us choose to make that correlation. College degrees are not required for entry-level firefighter and police jobs in most places, while they are for physicians and RNs. Your detective and hazmat technician analogies are closer in scope to Advanced Practice paramedics or Critical Paramedics...both of which require previous experience as a paramedic.
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Permalink Reply by Ben Waller on
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Jim,
If we require a college degree for paramedics, then the EMS instructors who are the best instructors and who have the most passion will gravitate toward the college-based EMS programs. As long as we recognize the "Ben's Garage School of EMS", we're not going to move toward making EMS truly professional.
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Permalink Reply by Jerry on -
Boy do I disagree with this, "However, it has now evolved into a combination of political and legal requirements that make the "exam" out of touch with reality." I presume you are making reference to the NREMT computer based testing and the basis for the test. I completely agree with the movement of national registry testing moving from rote memorization, "the correct dose of Lidocaine is A) B) C) D) - to application; given a scenario, you select the most appropriate response. The registry has eliminated the questions in which you are given a scenario and the nest 5 answers relate to the scenario. I believe that very few state directors, physicians and providers are scratching their heads; they are figuring out how to raise the floor, along with all of us that try to do what we can to move the "profession" forward.
Regarding the NREMT exam process; if anything the testing is far better because it ranges from "low-hanging fruit" (Greg Margolis, Associate Director of the registry) to really stretching your brain for the answer. It is way interesting talking with candidates after they have taken the registry exam; they know how many questions they answered, "The machine shut off after 92 questions, so I either did really good or really bad.
I applaud the registry for their work and for having field EMTs involved in the test writing process. If you are a national EMT, contact the registry about working on a test writing work group. It is wicked intense; to have any of your submitted and vetted questions pass through the process unchanged is almost as exciting as getting your initial certification. You also have an opportunity to work with some of the brightest minds in EMS. You will develop an amazing respect for the the process of developing the question bank, and realize how much you still have to learn. . .
Jim, I respect your position that, "Not every EMS training program provides college credit." You are correct, however, every EMS education program should. Please forgive my following analogy to the difference between education and training. A 14-year old student brought home a slip of paper from her school. She said to her father, "You have to sign one of the two lines, and I have to turn this in on Monday." The father opened the form, one line was permitting "sex education; the other was for "sex training." Which do you think he sighed, and, "WHY?" Do you want to be trained or educated in EMS?
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Permalink Reply by Ben Waller on
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Is a testing process that lets the candidate intuit that their results were either very good or very bad really a good test? I'd hypothesize that the questions on that test were phrased so mysteriously that the candidates might know how to treat the patient but not know for sure that they chose the best answer to convey their knowledge.
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Permalink Reply by Joe P. on -
Ben Waller said:Is a testing process that lets the candidate intuit that their results were either very good or very bad really a good test? I'd hypothesize that the questions on that test were phrased so mysteriously that the candidates might know how to treat the patient but not know for sure that they chose the best answer to convey their knowledge.
Any adaptive test will let the taker know, to an extent, if they were at an extreme or not. For example, when I reregistered this year, I did so by exam and not CME/refresher (I had the CMEs, but couldn't find a refresher since MA recerts at the end of the year and not in March) my exam cut off somewhere in the high 70s. At that point I either screwed the pooch really badly or destroyed the exam. There's simply no other options left. What I do think is bad is that there is no breakdown on the subsections like when it was a written exam. That said, the purpose of a certification exam is to tell the applicant if they posess the knowledge, and ability to apply that knowledge, not to tell students what they missed/got right. Yes, it can be extremely annoying for the test taker, but that's not the purpose of the exam.
I'll contrast my NREMT experience with my MCAT experience. The MCAT is a 4 section test with multiple choice sections in biology (biology and organic chemistry), physical sciences (physics and general chemistry), and a verbal reasoning (questions about text excerpts from everything to humanities to scientific studies). The bio and physical sciences sections are a combination of stand alone and passage questions. The 4th section is an essay section consisting of two essays.
The three multiple choice sections are given a standardized of 1-15 and make up the composite score with the average score being 7. When the final score report is given, it's simply the composite score, the sub section scores, and the percentile that the scores make up. Sure, test takers can develop an idea on how well they did, but I doubt most takers are laying down bets on what their score is. Furthermore, there is no information on what questions were correct or incorrect or which components of the subsection the taker is having issues with (for example, a student scoring a 10/15 in the bio section just knows that they scored a 10 in that section, not the percent of O chem and bio questions that the student missed.
Now I'm going to contrast this with the practice tests. The American Association of Medical Colleges, who writes the test, has released several exams comprised of retired questions. This would be like the NREMT retiring 150 questions and releasing a practice exam from the material. Now on those exams, students are told why the correct answer is correct and the computer versions of those exams allows the student to not only view the correct answer and why, but also tells the student which subsubsections (say biochem v anatomy v cell bio in the biology section) and allows the student to put in reasons why they missed the exam (didn't know, misread, ran out of time, etc) for further analysis of their ability to take the MCAT. The purpose of a certification or entrance exam is fundamentally different than a practice test.
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Permalink Reply by dr-exmedic on -
Gul Dukat said:
Yet you can work as an ED nurse without being a CEN first....I don't know that nursing is the best analogy out there to EMS, as some have claimed, but it does offer that comparison.However you can’t be a Cardiologist without becoming a Physician first. Or since some of you guys also like to pick and choose between medicine and public safety you can’t go from the Police Academy to being a Detective without having worked on the streets as a patrol man. You can’t be a Hazardous Materials Technician on most major Fire Departments without being a line Firefighter.
Your PD and FD examples are due to job structure, not to any actual coursework/certification requirement (disclaimer: at least in the states I've worked in). Of course the only way to be a police detective is to work your way up through the ranks (although there are private detectives, they don't really "detect" the same things); there is no "detective certification course." Similarly, there are plenty of Hazmat folks in private industry who don't know the first thing about fighting fires and around me, Hazmat certification is totally independent of FF certification.
Similarly, a Cardiologist is just a doc with some extra training, as a CCEMT-P is just a medic with extra training (at least in most states; there might be a couple who recognize those additional letters).
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Permalink Reply by Gul Dukat on -
All,
Again I understand what you are trying to say. As I also understand that most of you are trying to raise the bar as to what E.M.S. is and should be.
However while I respect all of your opinions on this I must politely disagree with the concept that Paramedics should be the base line of what E.M.S. is.
I know I am in the minority here and I am sure I will take fire for this but I still believe in the Emergency Medical Technician as a practicing member of the E.M.S. community.
I am one of those who believe that a Paramedic should be a specialist who is called upon in a time of need. Kind of like the Special Forces in the military.
I have already read many of the statements on this in the past on this forum from people who I highly respect who disagree with me. Again I am not going to say that I am right or that my way is the only way.
I am just saying that for those of us that do not live in major metropolitan areas or even county’s that have less than 30,000 people in them for the entire county. Doing away with the Basic E.M.T. is not practical and honestly, in my opinion only, not necessary.
I know that goes against the world view of those of you who want to make it so that every person who rides on a rig has a college degree.
Also while we all want to improve the profession as a whole I have to ask, where is the money coming from? Am I the only person who lives in a state where the economy is at the very least slow?
This actually brings me to the point where I almost feel compelled to make a new thread altogether asking about the cost of health care.
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Permalink Reply by Ben Waller on
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Gul,
I don't think you've heard anyone argue that we should do away with EMT-Bs, but as long as the standard for the profession is less training than is required to be a hairdresser or a manicurist, we're not going to unify or advance the profession. Once again, nursing hasn't "done away with" patient care techs. They use them to assist every day. They just don't base their profession on the lowest level of care that can be provided, and neither should we.
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Permalink Reply by Ben Waller on
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I realize that the purpose isn't to tell the candidate how they did in real time, but why are we building test methodology that puts people in one extreme in a way that they can't tell the difference? Candidates with a general knowledge of the subject matter should at least be able to have an idea if the questions are phrased in a way that is meaningful.
I've seen way too many test questions that are phrased less to see if the student knows the material than to try to trip the student up through confusing question structure, or interjecting complexities that would have nothing to do with the clinical problem in real life.
Joe P. said:Ben Waller said:Is a testing process that lets the candidate intuit that their results were either very good or very bad really a good test? I'd hypothesize that the questions on that test were phrased so mysteriously that the candidates might know how to treat the patient but not know for sure that they chose the best answer to convey their knowledge.
Any adaptive test will let the taker know, to an extent, if they were at an extreme or not. For example, when I reregistered this year, I did so by exam and not CME/refresher (I had the CMEs, but couldn't find a refresher since MA recerts at the end of the year and not in March) my exam cut off somewhere in the high 70s. At that point I either screwed the pooch really badly or destroyed the exam. There's simply no other options left. What I do think is bad is that there is no breakdown on the subsections like when it was a written exam. That said, the purpose of a certification exam is to tell the applicant if they posess the knowledge, and ability to apply that knowledge, not to tell students what they missed/got right. Yes, it can be extremely annoying for the test taker, but that's not the purpose of the exam.
I'll contrast my NREMT experience with my MCAT experience. The MCAT is a 4 section test with multiple choice sections in biology (biology and organic chemistry), physical sciences (physics and general chemistry), and a verbal reasoning (questions about text excerpts from everything to humanities to scientific studies). The bio and physical sciences sections are a combination of stand alone and passage questions. The 4th section is an essay section consisting of two essays.
The three multiple choice sections are given a standardized of 1-15 and make up the composite score with the average score being 7. When the final score report is given, it's simply the composite score, the sub section scores, and the percentile that the scores make up. Sure, test takers can develop an idea on how well they did, but I doubt most takers are laying down bets on what their score is. Furthermore, there is no information on what questions were correct or incorrect or which components of the subsection the taker is having issues with (for example, a student scoring a 10/15 in the bio section just knows that they scored a 10 in that section, not the percent of O chem and bio questions that the student missed.
Now I'm going to contrast this with the practice tests. The American Association of Medical Colleges, who writes the test, has released several exams comprised of retired questions. This would be like the NREMT retiring 150 questions and releasing a practice exam from the material. Now on those exams, students are told why the correct answer is correct and the computer versions of those exams allows the student to not only view the correct answer and why, but also tells the student which subsubsections (say biochem v anatomy v cell bio in the biology section) and allows the student to put in reasons why they missed the exam (didn't know, misread, ran out of time, etc) for further analysis of their ability to take the MCAT. The purpose of a certification or entrance exam is fundamentally different than a practice test.
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Permalink Reply by Gul Dukat on
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Ben,
In this thread you are correct no one has made that assertion.
However, and maybe I have not read this board correctly, I believe in the past I have read where some have advocated that very thing.
I have no opposition to higher education. So I don’t want to be labeled as the Anti-Education guy.
I just wanted to share my experience that over the years I have worked with several Paramedics who have gone straight from nothing to being a Paramedic and several who have taken the EMT first route and then to being a Paramedic. By far and away my experience has been that the ones who actually spent time on the streets as an EMT first do better in the long term and are usually more ready to hit the streets running (so to speak) when they first become Paramedics.
Again though just my opinion and experience here and I could be wrong.
Ben Waller said:Gul,
I don't think you've heard anyone argue that we should do away with EMT-Bs, but as long as the standard for the profession is less training than is required to be a hairdresser or a manicurist, we're not going to unify or advance the profession. Once again, nursing hasn't "done away with" patient care techs. They use them to assist every day. They just don't base their profession on the lowest level of care that can be provided, and neither should we.
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Permalink Reply by Ben Waller on
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Gul,
I'm one of those years-in-the-streets-as-a-basic guys. That said, better clinical training in a two-year paramedic course, especially when properly directed, would go a long way toward focusing the paramedic student on what it takes to be a paramedic. Being an EMT for a long time isn't the only way to get that experience.
<</body>
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Permalink Reply by Gul Dukat on
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Ben,
I guess I do need to make this clarification. I have never worked with a Paramedic who has gone straight from nothing to Paramedic via a degree. They have all been certificate Medics.
So your idea probably has more merit.
Ben Waller said:Gul,
I'm one of those years-in-the-streets-as-a-basic guys. That said, better clinical training in a two-year paramedic course, especially when properly directed, would go a long way toward focusing the paramedic student on what it takes to be a paramedic. Being an EMT for a long time isn't the only way to get that experience.
<</body>
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