Paramedic Groups Develop Community Medic Curriculum, Career Path

The Paramedic Foundation and Paramedic Health Solutions have teamed up to create a national curriculum with uniform educational standards for community paramedicine. This curriculum works to address the gaps in traditional prehospital provider training surrounding public health, long-term disease management, cultural competency and research.

The curriculum covers the higher-education spectrum from a certificate to a doctoral program. It has six levels, including primary care technician for EMT (PCT), community paramedic technician (CPT), community paramedic clinician (CPC), community paramedic practitioner (CPP), community paramedic advanced practitioner (CPAP) and community paramedic consultant (DCP). There are also two transition programs within the curriculum that incorporate a currently practicing provider’s experience. 

Although the designers of the curriculum see paramedicine moving toward higher levels of education, they created two programs that award a certificate or technical diploma to meet the minimum needs of providers already in the field. The first, primary care technician for EMT, requires 48 hours of total learning and introduces students to the social determinants of health, with an emphasis on health disparities, prevention and linking patients to other community programs. The second, community paramedic technician, requires 88 hours of total learning and introduces students in more detail to the concepts driving population health, with a heavy focus on integrating with local stakeholders.

Community paramedic clinician awards an associate degree upon completion and focuses on the decision making and critical thinking skills required for a community paramedic in the field. This degree requires 344 hours and specifically teaches students how to perform a community health needs assessment, which can allow providers to better understand the resources (and resource gaps) within their community.

The community paramedic practitioner awards a bachelor’s degree and expands the focus of the lower-level programs to include treatment plan modifications and a focus on addressing the culturally sensitive needs of the patient. The community paramedic advanced practitioner awards a Master of Science and is designed for experienced providers running community paramedicine programs. Although clinical topics are included in the coursework, it also covers health policy, administration and research in depth.

The community paramedicine consultant program awards a Doctor of Science aimed at students entering research or educational settings. As with other doctoral programs, research design, methodology and analysis are covered in depth. The hope is that graduates of these programs will be lifelong stewards of prehospital research able to present and integrate their findings across healthcare disciplines.

The curriculum is being beta-tested at a handful of sites across the country, including United Ambulance in Maine, Hennepin County in Minnesota, and The Christ College of Nursing and Health Sciences in Cincinnati. Each program is set up as a flipped classroom model in which students learn in the traditional classroom through video lectures and during their clinical rotations. The success of those programs should be known over the coming months, but preliminary results are positive.

The creators of the curriculum are all volunteers who recognized that the educational and career trajectory within EMS was not keeping pace with the changes being made across the service delivery model. As such they designed a curriculum that taps into the inherent skills of prehospital providers in a way that brings them legitimacy while also benefiting the patients they serve.

For more information on the curriculum, download the Community Paramedicine National Curriculum & Career Pathway.

Catherine R. Counts is a doctoral candidate in the department of Global Health Management and Policy at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, where she also previously earned her Master of Health Administration. Counts has research interests in domestic healthcare policy, quality and patient safety, organizational culture and prehospital emergency medicine. Follow her on Twitter at @CatherineCounts.