A year in the life of a remote medic

Having reached 2 years post registration as a paramedic in August 2009, I felt I was ready to move on in my career. From my early days with the ambulance service, I had realized that if I became a qualified paramedic I could use it to fulfill one of the passions of my life which is to travel the world. I had longed to be in a position where I sat at home and the telephone rang and someone told me they needed a medic to travel to some far flung corner of the planet to cover some exciting project or expedition.

Visions of myself at an airport with an A&E department packed away in a backpack and company flight ticket seemed very appealing. A few tentative enquires showed that to achieve my aim I needed to add a few little extras onto my qualification. So along with my partner Andrea, who is a registered nurse and was working in A&E in Coventry University Hospital, I applied to the offshore medic’s course at the postgraduate centre at Nottingham University Hospital (Alsop, 2011).