When you decided to cut taxes and reduce our staff, I was the one that had to work triple duty to keep our community safe.
When your husband needed chemo three times a week, I was …
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by Sherry Jones Mayo, RN, EMTP, DAAETS
Author of Confessions of a Trauma Junkie: My Life as a Nurse Paramedic
Contributing writer to Public Safety Degrees
When you decided to become a part of emergency services, did it ever cross your mind that your professional identity could directly relate to the economy? Those of us who grew up with TV’s Roy and Johnny saw emergency medicine as a noble, rewarding, and marketable professional goal, but today we may question those assumptions. Firefighter/Paramedic job security is failing, the minimum degree expectation for hiring is rising, and competition is at an all-time high.
How do you compete, and what are the next steps to ensure that you will be able to care for yourself professionally, your family financially, and your future securely?
Paramedics have struggled for years to establish themselves as professional, skilled clinicians, who deliver patient care in impossible situations and against almost insurmountable odds. We have gone from ‘load and go ambulance drivers’ to professionals that are part of the primary patient care system, but that is only the beginning. Peter O’Meara (2009) advises, “… the future development of the profession has been the progressive move from a vocationally based training system to university based undergraduate education, with Bachelor degrees as the entry-level qualification.”
Speak with any of your contemporaries and you will hear stories related to ‘going back to school’. The days of getting settled into a job and retiring at that same level 30 years later are gone. Aside from keeping current on professional practices and literature, we need to continue to grow and learn beyond mandated Continuing Education for licensure and certifications. Not taking that next step may cost you; rationalizations of why you cannot improve your education and marketability will decrease your competitive edge. Managing money, time, stress, academic challenge, and sheer exhaustion is not easy, but doable.
So what are your options?
Actually, they are almost limitless; we have more choices today than ever before. For those who wish to stay in direct patient care but come out of the uncontrolled environment of the streets, there are several options for becoming a registered nurse, including bridge programs for Paramedic to RN transition. For those whose professional exposure sparks a desire to handle crisis from a managerial perspective, there are bachelor and master’s degree programs in Emergency and Disaster Management, EMS Management, Public Safety Administration, Public Personnel Management, and Disaster Medicine Management. Read the full story »
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by Sherry Jones Mayo, RN, EMTP, DAAETS
Author of Confessions of a Trauma Junkie: My Life as a Nurse Paramedic
Contributing writer to Public Safety Degrees
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