Because in all honesty it would be an understatement to say I am horrendously disgusted and at a loss to understand how anybody from instructor to regulator to student to medical director can think 12 weeks of instruction is acceptable to learn advanced life support?
We had one of these wonder people who had been to some quick and dirty patch factory come down here. Thier level of knowledge was so inadequate it wasn't funny.
I guess if we require four years of education and internship for Paramedic (somewhere between I and P) and six or seven years for Intensive Care Paramedic (ALS) we are doing something wrong because obviously 12 weeks plus a couple hundred hours of skills experience is adequate?
The minority may not be representative of the majority but honestly which do you think stands out; the guy who went to a decent two year program or somebody who rocked down to the couple month zero-to-hero school?
In the 1970s it took two years to become a Qualified Ambulance Officer (who couldn't really do much except dish out oxygen and one or two meds) and yet somehow, forty years later, the American system cannot mandate such a requirement at even the top level, let alone the bottom.
While it is easy to point fingers at other people I should say we've taken a huge backward step here in New Zealand. Gone are the days when it took a year or more to become a qualified Ambulance Officer and one was required to do a large number of pre-block course assignments around anatomy and phys because that is "not relevant when crewing an ambulance" so 24 weeks part-time is now acceptable it seems. Never mind the mandatory Bachelors Degree or higher for Paramedic and above and in mandating such a qualification a huge disparity is created between what is now styled "Ambulance Technician" (I sure as hell wouldn't call them a 'clinician') and higher levels.
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