The more I think about it, the more I think my response might have been too black and white. Had circumstances in my past been differently, I likely would have ended up becoming a medic in Jersey City (and probably crossed into Newark or MONOC on my days off like many others) in 2005 with a major drinking problem, and been completely miserable with life.... Looking back, I'm very glad that didn't happen.
Let me modify the statement from
@joshrunkle35 and let me know if it sounds better:
If EMS is to be your full time career, than no one should be able to be an EMT for longer than 6 years; you need to go to paramedic school if you want to be seen as a knowledgeable and competent EMS provider. The same goes for LPN; if you are still an LPN after 5 years, which doesn't permit you do do all the things an RN can do, than there is a problem, and it's time for your to rethink your career.
As brutally harsh as that is, I don’t disagree with it.
Especially now that I live in an All ALS system, where BLS ambulances are unheard of (and the overall EMS care isn't that much better TBH, esp since the medics spend soooo much time dealing with BLS patients), if you want to be anything more than on the ambulance, you need to have a paramedic certification. It's just the nature of the system, not that the paramedic cert makes you any more qualified in many cases.
With all the part time EMS providers, or people who have an EMT cert yet EMS isn't their primary focus (every firefighter in the US, I'm looking at you, or cops who have an EMT cert yet they have never actually been on an ambulance), or volunteer providers (which is an entirely different rabbit-hole that I don't want to go down) it's both unreasonable and absurd to say that they should have to go to paramedic school, when they have no desire to, and would only make for a poor providers, especially if they stopped learning new things once they got their P card.
But if this is going to be your long term career, that you are going to spend 10+ years doing, and you want to be an EMS professional, than you should take the plunge and demonstrate that you can practice at the highest level of prehospital care.