Emt Does it get Better?

[Dustdevil]

seems to me that if you don't have an iinterestin it already, that you might as well quit while you are ahead. ems isisn'tor everyone. and if you stay with it and don't develop an interest for it, there goes your money down the drain, along with your time.

Valid point, but unfortunately, most states have incorporated EMT into the basic fire certification curriculum. If somebody wants to be a firefighter, they have to be an EMT also, even if their department does not run EMS. And even in those states that do not require it, individual departments are more likely to hire somebody with EMT than somebody who is not.

This, my friends, is why fire based EMS usually ends up substandard to non-fire based. There is no motivation. They don't care. It's not what they want to be doing. But they (the departments) continue to do it for the money, knowing that their community could not care less about quality of service. The individuals are not to be blamed for this. The idiot adminstrators and politicians who push off the job on people who aren't interested in it are the ones screwing it up.

I am all for firefighters being trained to a high degree of proficiency in first aid, which is basically all EMT is. And yes, it should be a requirement of firefighter certification. But they should devise a curriculum for this that is more applicable to firefighters. There is just way too much crap in the EMT curriculum that has no application to non-ambulance based providers. That time could be much better spent on other skills.

Actually, just getting rid of this whole EMT nonsense altogether would solve both of our problems.