Paramedic Education Program
Booker EMS - ISEMSEd Paramedic Education Consortium
Booker EMS has formed a Consortium with Innovative Solutions EMS Education Program (ISEMSEd.), a subsidiary of Innovative Solutions Management (ISM). At the time of the publishing of this page, the BEMS-ISEMSEd Paramedic Education Consortium is actively pursuing our accreditation and hopes to have our first paramedic cohort beginning in January 2025.
What is the Paramedic Paradox?
Booker EMS, like many rural and frontier EMS services, faces a challenge to recruit and retain paramedics, especially given our limited ability to generate revenue due to our low call volume.
The Paramedic Paradox states that:
1. The further a patient is from definitive care (i.e. a Trauma surgeon and OR team for a traumatic injury; or an interventional cardiologist in the case of a heart attack) the MORE likely a paramedic’s level of knowledge and skill can directly impact the patient’s survival and outcome.
BUT, ALSO
2. The further a patient is from definitive care, the less likely they are to have access to a paramedic’s level of care.
This fundamentally feeds the challenge for services like Booker EMS. In an urban environment you might have 6 or 7 paramedics respond to your request for service (1-4 on the fire engine, 1-2 on the ambulance, and a second ambulance or EMS supervisor), and only be minutes from the definitive care for your injury/illness. But in a rural environment, you may not even have access to a single paramedic on the ambulance in many communities.
Recognizing this challenge, and further understanding that the best way to retain EMS professionals in rural environments is to recruit from within your own community, Booker EMS and our partners at ISM have worked for many years to reach the goal of an in house education program that can take recruits from the “street” with no prior knowledge or certifications, all the way through the paramedic level education and beyond with our post paramedic and continuing education programs.
Why is it important to have Paramedic Education at Booker EMS?
Providing a pathway within our service to recruit interested applicants from within our community, and provide them the education and credentials they need from initial EMT education, through the AEMT and Paramedic certifications, and beyond with our post paramedic education program (including specialties like Flight Paramedic, Community Paramedic, and more), and continuing education program. This helps ensure that Booker EMS will continue to be able to defeat the paramedic paradox and provide our community with the absolute highest level of service and care.