Paramedic shortage on the cards
A move by the Health Minister to limit the training of paramedics to universities could lead to a serious drop in their numbers.
Will another Life Esidimeni saga emerge — this time on a national scale — after Emergency Medical Practitioner (EMS) short courses were signed into non-existence by the Health Minister?
The new regulation put forward by the Health Professionals’ Council of South Africa (HPCSA) was signed into effect on Friday, 27 January by Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi.
The regulation will terminate all Critical Care Assistant (CCA) and Basic Life Support (BLS) short courses at the end of 2017. All Intermediate Life Support (ILS) courses will then be stopped in 2019.
EMS personnel and prospective personnel will now have to attend university for four years before they can start working on an ambulance.
Denver Ramnarian, founder and executive member of Quick Response Service (QRS) is deeply concerned about the move.
He predicts a shortage of EMS personnel in the near future, due to the high staff turnover in the profession.
“The short courses produced trained paramedics every six weeks, filling the gap left by those who leave the profession. The universities will now only produce less than 50 students every four years while the West Rand needs about 100 paramedics every year, because of the high staff turnover,” Ramnarian said.
Going the university route means that only 16 to 20 applicants are taken in per year, and approximately five universities offer full-time EMS courses. Whether or not applicants pass or even complete the course is also a variable.
Those who have already completed their CCA and BLS courses will now have to start from scratch, which means those already in the profession would have to take four years off to complete their EMS training.
Wian de Beer, an ILS from QRS, is one such EMS practitioner whose plan it was to work his way up to being an Advanced Life Support (ALS) while working.
“I’m now at the point where I’m unable to do this, because no one is offering the course any longer. My only way forward now is to go to university for four years and start from scratch. It takes my entire five years’ experience away. I don’t have the money to take off four years to study.”
Ramnarian is deeply concerned about the regulation and does not know what the world of emergency services will look like in the near future.
“[T]he department has taken a running system and replaced it with a crawling system […] I feel they should have gradually introduced the system, making it grow gradually, instead of cutting the working system off completely,” Ramnarian said.
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