Emergency care apprenticeship: a new pathway

A new qualification for emergency care workers was recently accredited onto the qualification credit framework by Ofqual— the level 2 diploma in emergency care assistance.

This is the first new non-higher education qualification for emergency ambulance staff since the driving qualification was formalized in 1995. Clinically, it is the first since the original paramedic qualification approved by the National Staff Committee (the predecessor of the IHCD), over 20 years ago.

The new qualification will be available as a discrete qualification but also acts as the vocational component of a new health sector apprenticeship—the first ambulance specific apprentice pathway.

Apprenticeships are not new but have changed their shape and content several times over the years. The need to train school leavers and re-train adults is ever present—it is the funding of this which has been the main challenge.

The author can just about recall apprenticeship programmes running in the 1970s, or rather running out of steam as the UK's traditional industries such as manufacturing went into decline. Then, those wishing to learn a trade followed programmes of training approved by industrial training boards (forerunners of the current sector, skills councils), on a pittance for three years, until they qualified—so-called ‘time served’. In return, employers running apprenticeships were exempt from paying a levy to their training board.