Center for Prehospital Care Converting Lessons for Web Delivery

Each year paramedics in Los Angeles County must undergo an educational update. It consists a few hours in the classroom to bring them up to speed on what’s new and changing with protocols and other facets of their jobs—not a huge ordeal if you’re an individual medic. But the larger process is pretty intensive: The educational material is developed by the county Department of Health Services’ EMS Agency, then distributed to all the agencies that deliver paramedic-level care in L.A. County, and they have to disseminate it to their people, who have to complete it by a certain date to keep working.

It’s a process that could be simplified by putting the material online. At the behest of county EMS leaders, UCLA’s Center for Prehospital Care is moving it there.

“The biggest benefit we’re hoping for is consistency in education,” says Barry Jensen, NREMT-P, NCEE, program director for the Center’s EMT and EMR programs and online education. “It’s kind of like what the AHA did: Instead of having individual instructors present material with their own little twists to it, they wanted a constant message out there. Also, for the agencies it will free up education time—now they can spend that classroom time doing something else.”

Additionally, the content will be archived online for later review and reference by others, and county EMTs and providers from elsewhere are invited to utilize it too. It’s not mandatory for L.A.’s EMTs, but they can get free CEUs by taking it.

“We want all the EMTs to do it,” says Jensen. “The county’s never mandated this training for them. But there are probably around 14,000 EMTs in the county, and the material’s really beneficial for them as well. So by putting it online, not only can we get it out there to paramedics, but the EMTs can also take it, at no charge. That’s one of the great advantages.”

The Center for Prehospital Care had previously worked with the county developing an online scope-of-practice course for EMTs; that was well received and paved the way for the current partnership. For the involved Center staff—basically just Jensen, fellow educator Mark Malonzo and IT coordinator James MacCurdy—it’s meant hundreds of hours of work scripting out and recording various PowerPoint presentations. But once it’s done, the county will have a permanent resource, and providers—not all of whom, let’s face it, are enthusiastic about their yearly educational requirements—will have more flexibility in how they meet their mandates.

It could even create a route for more frequent, smaller-chunk updates even more easily completed.

“Why not start getting stuff out there on a quarterly basis, and we can start getting things updated in the county in a more timely fashion?” Jensen notes. “That’s something I’d like to see happen in the future.”

For more on the UCLA Center for Prehospital Care, see www.cpc.mednet.ucla.edu/. Access the EMS educational content from the banner at the bottom.

John Erich is associate editor for EMS World.