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Has anyone heard of a push to make all Fire Fighters earn a Paramedic certification? What do you think is the timeline?

I know here in Tn that if you are a Vol. Firefighter. That the fire house will pay for your schooling. I have a friend that is a Vol. Firefighter and he said it will take bout 3 years to be cerified for a EMT and Paramedic....

I agree with chase1 here.  I will use my dept as an example.  While we are encouraged to have EMT-I, First responder is the minimum. The GA hope grant pays for schooling in EMS (basic, intermediate, and para)  Our reasoning is this, we don't run a box out of our stations. They stand alone here.  They do have resue equip., but its the bare minimum, they depend on us and vice versa.  Being a county dept, we get first call to cardiac, severe trauma, accidents, etc with EMS.  We have the capability to start BLS only.  So far this hass worked out pretty well.  Of course, talk of the future will most likely intergrate our services,  much like large metro depts.  Until then, life rolls on. 

I think this Paramedic you talked to, was not being realistic.  First of all you have a volume of information to take in Basic Fire Figthing.  If that is completed, then you can if you want take EMT-B.   This just adds to your present skills, and puts you in a position to package up a patient for transport.  Not many stations in New Jersey have ambulances running out of the fire station.  The Emergency Services are run out of an entirely different station.  Plus the paramedic is usually run out of a local hospital and answers up to only severe cases that require his expertise.

But for you to have a Fire Fighters Cert and and EMT-B and a Paramedic is way too much for you or anybody else to expect.  That would take about 4 years of schooling alone.  I would concentrate on your Fire Fighter knowledge.  The, if you want get your EMT-B.

You would still be way ahead with the Fire Fighter knowledge including EMT.  But, if you add on Paramedicine, you just don't have the available tools to work with out of a Fire Station.  Paramedicine carries an entirely different bag.  They can give medicine and talk to the medical director etc etc.

The guy pushing Paramedicine along with Fire Fighting, I think was talking a bit beyond his mouth.

We are a very small town in PA and we have trouble getting cert. first responders and EMT's. Our EMS council is right now pushing to try and get us a course for EMT-I. We need more medics in our area. We only have two to cover our county. As far as making us get cert. No, I haven't heard anything like that around here.

I havent heard anything about this in NJ. Here if you want to go to EMT-B classes the state/local government will pick up the cost for the training if you are a volunteer. As for Medic I am taking medic classes now and they are not cheap ($3500 per semester plus clinical fees) and are only available at certain colleges in the state. This is not paid for by state funds as medics in NJ work for and are sponsered by hospitals. It is not easy to attain an EMT-P MICU cert in NJ and all medic programs are controleed through the hospitals in the state and not in fire departments. Also a recent study done by the state office of emergency services and it showed that most paid fire services in the state do not want ems as part of their service as it would add additional costs to there budget there are some departments that provide BLS and First Responder services but they are very few (I am in Jersey City EMS and the fire Department here is First Responders only). So I do not see this as happening in Jersey anytime soon

Depends on where you go, but yes, you want to be a firefighter somewhere paramedic is a big plus. Memphis requires that all new hires starting October 2007 become paramedic certified within 3 years of hire. We're projecting that we'll be all ALS in 10-15 years, and when you consider that we have almost 1900 employees now, that's a big BIG number.

THE TIMELINE WOULD BE PRETTY LONG...I JUST FINNISHED MY EMT-B (I GO FRI FOR MY NATIONAL REGISTRY TEST). THE CLASS WAS  $600.. AND AROUND HERE YOU HAVE TO HAVE AT LEAST 2 YEARS EXPERIENCE AS AN EMT BEFORE YOU CAN APPLY TO MEDIC SCHOOL, AND MEDIC SCHOOLS AROUND HERE ARE 18 MONTHS AND ABOUT $2700.. AT THE PAID DEPT HERE IN MADISONVILLE, THE PAY FOR YOU TO GO TO EMT IF YOU CHOOSE TO WANT TO GO, MOST OF THE PAID FIREFIGHTERS WORK AT THE AMBULANCE SERVICE PRN ANYWAY. AT MY VOLUNTEER DEPT WE HAVE 24 MEMBERS AND 7 ARE EMTS AND 3 ARE MEDICS. THE REST ARE JUST REQUIRED TO KEEP AN UP TO DATE CPR CARD

PARAMEDIC SCHOOL

 

SInce we have taken ourselves out of firefighting (Fire Sprinklers and Fire Prevention)

Before it was 80% fire 20% ems but after Dorothy Mae and Intro of Fire Sprinklers EMS NOW WINS !!

Welcome to the future PARAMEDIC

To be a paid FF it is almost required in our area tobe an emt. There is a push for us as ff's to be intermediates but it's been going on for years. The Ems system in our county is at paramedic level and they are there own entity. And want it that way. So as for us being pushed to the paramedic level it will be a while.

thats the way it is here in illinois, at least in the towns around me, aside from entry level openings, most departments require emt cert along with ff II cert, therye not called ff's around here.  most of the towns list opening positions for Firefighter/Emt.