British Citizen with American EMT-B cert visiting Australia!

[scott33]

State Registered Paramedic which now requires a two year Foundation Degree

The Scottish Ambulance Service do not require a degree for HPC registration. Nor are they limited to working north of Hadrians Wall.

[systemet]

A three year bachelor's degree, interesting. I've had to do associate degree programmes that took three years, too bad I wasn't awarded a bachelor's.

I can't speak to the NZ or Aussie educational systems, but in the UK it's quite common that a Bachelor's degree is only 3 years. But their last two years of "high school" typically have them focusing on 3 subjects at an advanced level. So if you have someone coming out of secondary school with Math, Biology and Chemistry, they've often covered these topics in depth equivalent to a first-year university student.

This is great in terms of reducing the time spent in university getting a Bachelor's degree, but it's tough for students, as they have to make some pretty major decisions while pretty young about what courses they're going to take at "A/level". These decisions open some doors, but close many others. The advantage of the US / Canadian system is having a much broader base education and more options at graduation, and less closed doors before leaving high school. The down-side is the added cost and time of a four-year Bachelor's.

[chbare]

I can't speak to the NZ or Aussie educational systems, but in the UK it's quite common that a Bachelor's degree is only 3 years. But their last two years of "high school" typically have them focusing on 3 subjects at an advanced level. So if you have someone coming out of secondary school with Math, Biology and Chemistry, they've often covered these topics in depth equivalent to a first-year university student.

This is great in terms of reducing the time spent in university getting a Bachelor's degree, but it's tough for students, as they have to make some pretty major decisions while pretty young about what courses they're going to take at "A/level". These decisions open some doors, but close many others. The advantage of the US / Canadian system is having a much broader base education and more options at graduation, and less closed doors before leaving high school. The down-side is the added cost and time of a four-year Bachelor's.

Much appreciated, that really provided me a significant amount of clarity regarding my original question.

[craig]

all i have listed in a previous post, there is a vast arrange of drugs and skill a paramedic in nsw has to carry and complete.

This is a far cry more detailed than what an emt-b can and will do in the states.

If your lucky you can still join the service here as a mature age person (with some trade qualifications etc) and start as a trainee and work your way up to a paramedic over the next 2.5 to 3 years.

But the service is heading towards (and has already implemented) the idea that they employ only people that have completed a 3 year BA at Uni for the position as a paramedic. then they have to still the to training 'in house' but it will take only about 12 - 18 months to get to the paramedic level.

to attain the ICP level they will stall ave to be employed as at least a 3rd year paramedic and then apply for the skill upgrade and training (in house) to gain this position. Uni degree will give some credit toward the training, but not negate it.

For the record to explain the school system here in Aus (NSW anyway)... My son completed Bio, Chem etc at school in his HSC...studying at Uni to get his BA the first year Bio and Chem was not as hard as the same subjects in hi uni course, just the essays were a little different to do. Second year seems to be a little more in depth, so he says

[Kiwiology]

They do not appear to understand the science any better, perform stoichometry any better or find the derivative of a function any better than myself. I am not particularly intelligent either, nor am I an outlier in terms of intelligence or cognitive abilities. Again, some of the best and most professional folks I have had the pleasure to work with are bachelor's educated medics not educated in the United States. I don't know, perhaps I am a little tired of the standard comments or I've developed educational jet lag from working on my bachelor's degree, where I've yet to appreciate any significant yield from these supposedly upper level classes.

If you're not particularly intelligent then I am even less intelligent than you!

The requirement for a Bachelors Degree at least in this part of the world is several fold.

It is the standard for entry into a "professional" career and every other regulated health profession requires at least a Bachelors Degree - see my previous post for the list.

The Ambulance Service signalled its intention to move away from the vocational training path about seven years ago because the direction they wanted to take service delivery was inconsistent with the technical diploma as gradual and progressive expansion of scopes of practice and the desire to refer people away from hospital wherever possible requires much broader foundation education than can be offered in a technical diploma.

A degree had existed for a number of years in Auckland and the employment of degree graduates was creating a disparate divide between the "new" officers who knew all the science and needed a little time to consolidate it in practice vs the "old" officers who knew a small amount of science but were experts at the "doing".

It had also been the majority employers' view for a number of years that Paramedics be included under the Health Practitioners Act but the technical diploma was inconsistent with requirements for registration.

The Scottish Ambulance Service do not require a degree for HPC registration. Nor are they limited to working north of Hadrians Wall.

Ah I forget there are other parts of UK besides England

SAS has partnered with GCU so Technicians now have to do the CertHE and Paramedic the DipHE

NIAS still teaches the old IHCD Award it seems

The advantage of the US / Canadian system is having a much broader base education and more options at graduation, and less closed doors before leaving high school. The down-side is the added cost and time of a four-year Bachelor's.

That is true but the general theory in this part of the world is that you go to secondary school to get an education in the basics e.g. math, english, science/chemistry, social studies etc and that you go to University for your specialised entry level professional training and go back for a Masters etc when you wish to specialise within your career field

I don't honestly think the extra "general education" is really worthwhile or necessary and it just adds to the cost and time required to get a degree

For the record to explain the school system here in Aus (NSW anyway)... My son completed Bio, Chem etc at school in his HSC...studying at Uni to get his BA the first year Bio and Chem was not as hard as the same subjects in hi uni course, just the essays were a little different to do. Second year seems to be a little more in depth, so he says

Yeah first year uni here is really not much harder than NCEA Level 3 (what you call HSC) the essays etc are a bit different if you're writing them or if you're doing science stuff the content might be different but not much "harder" conceptually. The big jump is to being an independent learner

When we were sending second year uni students on exchange to US they were having to do third or fourth year classes to match the academic requirements here

[systemet]

The Ambulance Service signalled its intention to move away from the vocational training path about seven years ago because the direction they wanted to take service delivery was inconsistent with the technical diploma as gradual and progressive expansion of scopes of practice and the desire to refer people away from hospital wherever possible requires much broader foundation education than can be offered in a technical diploma.

[snip]

It had also been the majority employers' view for a number of years that Paramedics be included under the Health Practitioners Act but the technical diploma was inconsistent with requirements for registration.

This is great. Hopefully this attitude becomes more prevalent in other regions. I've listened to no end of people argue for scope expansion, more responsibility and better pay without actually wanting to increase the educational level.

I don't honestly think the extra "general education" is really worthwhile or necessary and it just adds to the cost and time required to get a degree

I don't know here. I mean, part of the 4-year Bachelor's versus 3-year Bachelor's is a consequence of the lack of specialisation in the final years of high school --- but this does preserve options for the high school graduates. If at age 18, they decide that maybe engineering was more their goal than nursing, often they have the prerequisite courses, or only require a short period of study to get one extra course.

In the context of a Bachelor's degree, I don't know. Obviously for the North American system, you have certain prerequisite courses that the medical / dental / veterinary programs demand, as they don't typically have Bachelor's stream medical education. And you have to prepare for the MCAT. So this has lead to biology degrees tending to have a fairly similar common first two years.

I think it has to depend on the aim of the degree. I don't think I know anyone who's taken nursing, for example, who didn't want to have more electives and fewer core nursing courses. Having those elective courses lets you choose areas of interest to focus on, or learn more about. I think even for an engineer, having the ability to learn a foreign language, or take some economics or financial planning might be very beneficial, both in terms of personal satisfaction, and in a long term career path.

I have a science degree, with all the typical MCAT pre-requisite stuff, and a ton of cell bio, biochemistry, pharmacology, physiology, genetics, etc. I think if I could go back and do it again, I'd benefit from taking less hard science, and more arts courses. There's also a certain argument that while your strengths tend to be what makes you successful, your greatest gains are often working on your weak areas.

Yeah first year uni here is really not much harder than NCEA Level 3 (what you call HSC) the essays etc are a bit different if you're writing them or if you're doing science stuff the content might be different but not much "harder" conceptually. The big jump is to being an independent learner

I found this to be very true as well. With high school level courses I was always able to just sit in the room, absorb the material, do a minimal amount of studying and regurgitate it for fairly high grades. With university, I often didn't get the quality of teaching to be able to do that, or, in many more cases, I was competing against a large number of really smart people for a grade on a bell curve distribution. Much more time was spent directing my own study.

This was also a major contrast with paramedic school for me. Although it also required a lot of self-study, paramedic school consisted of being in the gym from 0700-0900, and in classes solid from 0900-1700, monday to friday. A more typical university schedule would be about 3-3.5 hours of lecture a day, and maybe an hour or two of labs a couple of days of the week. But I new I was spending at least one or two hours studying myself for every lecture hour spent in the class room.

When we were sending second year uni students on exchange to US they were having to do third or fourth year classes to match the academic requirements here

While I have no direct experience of either NZ or US university programs, I think this probably just reflects being a year ahead. If they've already taken introductory courses, then they're going to need to be taking more specialised courses.

I also think this is the primary difference between first-year courses and so-called "advanced courses". I don't think that the information in an advanced cell biology class is necessarily more complex --- it's just more specialised. You're dealing with material that often hasn't made the textbooks yet, and often you're learning to evaluate new research, and considering ideas in areas that lack a consensus opinion. The focus becomes more about asking "What do we think is happening?", "What evidence supports this belief?", and "What issues need to be resolved in order to have a more complete understanding?", and "What experiments would blow this theory out of the water?". Graduate studies in biomedical science tend to be more about actually doing those experiments, and investigating those areas.

I think often the first-year courses are actually more difficult, because they cover such a broad range of topics that they feel disjointed, and it becomes harder to identify underlying concepts. The difficulty of the course often also depends on factors like who's in the classroom (determining how difficult it's going to be to get a difficult grade --- a neuroscience course with 75% honors degree in neuroscience students might be hard for the average English literature student to take as an elective, just as the neurosci kids might have trouble with analysing Chaucer or something). I've definitely taken graduate courses that have been easier than some undergraduate courses. Or fourth year courses that have been less challenging than first year courses.

Everyone also has their weak points, things they just don't like or "don't get". Microbiology is one for me. I can't stand the "trainspotting nature", of looking at, that's a non-motile gram positive acid-fast coccus.... what species and genera could it belong to?

[Kiwiology]

Honestly I don't think that extra year really counts for anything except extra debt and time studying but if you aren't doing the fifth year of secondary education then perhaps it might be a good thing but should be limited to the first year only.

The University of Auckland (one of the 50 top uni's in the world) has a requirement that two classes in each degree be general education or outside the scope of your degree one in first year, one in second year I think, certain degrees only have one gen ed class req e.g. medicine and nursing

Nursing is a pain in the ass to be honest we have no national curricula and no interest in getting one so each degree teaches slightly different things e.g. the University of Auckland teaches the nurses the same biology and physiology (and biochem if the student wishes) that they teach to a first year student doctor and it's not hard per-se but it's intense compared to what the local polytechnic where I am teaches. At MIT in South Auckland they teach hard out Maori and Pacifica health because let's face it there are no white people south of Ellerslie/Mt Wellington but down here we barely even touch upon it.

In my city we have both a University and a Polytech teaching nursing and while I'm not hating on the polytech nurses the difference is marked when you get into the science content and pathophysiology. I am taking pathophysiology next semester and it's what the second year medical students learn and I've had a look at the old exams, I'm scared, I mean I'm worried and I usually eat biomedical type stuff for breakfast. The polytech's took the Diploma and dressed it up to become a "Degree" back in 1993 but the Universities can pull in the expertise of their science or medicine faculty to teach that part or the psychology school to teach psych ... god how i hate psych i hate it with a passion so much, i hate it more than i hate DNA and genetics, and I hate them so much!

Anyway little bit of a side rant there, I guess its how you structure your education

Oh and for the record, the "graduate entry only MD" style education that exists only in the US and Canada is something I strongly disagree with. There are two programs in Australia that are now graduate entry only styling themselves as "MD" as opposed to MBBS and I am very worried it will become the standard in AU too.

Edited April 30, 2012 by Kiwiology