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Length of professional education of paramedics and nurses at community colleges in the Northeast United States

02 July 2015
Volume 7 · Issue 7

Abstract

Aim:

To determine if the professional bodies of knowledge of paramedics and nurses are roughly equivalent for each discipline at the point of primary licensure.

Methods:

A list was compiled of all paramedic education programmes in the Northeast US states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Each programme was then surveyed to identify those institutions that offered college credit for their paramedic education programme and also had an associate's degree nursing programme. Northeast paramedic education programmes that were not accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Allied Health Education Programs were then identified that offered college credit for their paramedic education programme and also had an associate's degree nursing programme.

Results:

In total, 23 colleges in the Northeast United States had both paramedic and registered nursing education programmes offered for college credit. Paramedic education required a mean of 41 credits compared to a mean of 37 credits for nursing education.

Conclusions:

While paramedics are less likely to have a college degree than registered nurses, their specific professional education programmes are equivalent. Further research is required to establish if the paramedic body of knowledge is both deep and complex enough that it is unsafe for non-paramedic registered nurses to be functioning in the pre-hospital environment.

Paramedics in the US are less likely to hold a college degree than registered nurses. According to the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians' (NREMT) National Longitudinal EMTs Attributes and Demographics Study (LEADS ll), 43% of paramedics reported that their highest level of education was ‘some college’, 21% reported an associate's degree, and 23% reported a bachelor's degree (NREMT, 2014). In contrast, in 2008, 13.9% of registered nurses held a non-degree diploma (down from 55% in 1980), 36.1% held an associate's degree, and 36.8% held a bachelor's degree (American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), 2011) (See Table 1). While both paramedics and registered nurses undergo professional education programmes totalling over 1 000 hours in order to attain basic mastery of each profession's body of knowledge—and this basic mastery is assessed both by the college and externally, through passing a state licensing exam in order to practice—the dominant model of nursing education has clearly shifted away from a certificate model and toward a degree-based model over the past few decades (AACN, 2011).

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