Massachussetts Recertification Scandal Affect Public Perception of EMS Providers

This story is looking at this situation in Massachusetts. You know, I think a few bad apples can make all of us look bad pretty quickly but what about what’s going on up there? Maybe you haven’t become aware, State of Massachusetts public health officials are looking over the EMT re-certification standards and procedures for how those certifications are verified over the last few years because 200 emergency medical responders in different communities, this isn’t just isolated to one system.

Apparently, in different communities around the Massachusetts -the state, they are having issues with their certification because of falsified records. They got re-certified and didn’t actually obtain the requisite hours of attended re-certification training. They didn’t go to the con ed and somehow they were able to get signed off on it. This has become a huge issue, it’s a black eye to a lot of providers because of course every time someone in Massachusetts gets on the ambulance right now if this is a story in the headlines, they’re wondering “does this guy know what the heck he’s doing? Is he trained? Is he adequately prepared to take care of me?” we shouldn’t have to be dealing with that in the back of an ambulance and it’s really shameful.

You know, you’re only hurting yourself and your patients by trying to take shortcuts. It’s not that onerous to go out there and get your re-certification training and if you do it right and look at it with the proper attitude, you can have some fun with it. I find, even if I take classes that I’ve had before, classes like ACLS, like PALS, classes like the prehospital trauma life support, the pediatric education for prehospital providers. All of those can lettered-numeraled classes out there that we have to retake on a regular basis, every single time I take them, I relearn something I forgot. Something that goes by in that class if I had my mind open and my ears open and I’m paying attention, something goes by that says “huh, I forgot that.” I remembered hearing it in another class and it just slipped my mind and it was something that I could reapply to my practice and how I handle my patient care. And so I say to you, if you were thinking about finding a way around and getting your  certification taken care of, finding a way around getting re-certified appropriately, you are just shortchanging yourself and you’re providing bad patient care. And that’s something that you shouldn’t be doing obviously.

So I want all of you to think about this. Learn from this story that there are no shortcuts, you need to go ahead and do it and if you approach it right, go in there. If nothing else, you make some new friends in the business. You meet some people you didn’t know before, you get a new instructor’s take on what’s going on in this particular topic area and you can take that information and run with it as far as you want to basically. And if you have the right attitude, you can pick up quite a bit form any class you take as your continuing education requirement and re-certify appropriately.

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This article has been features in the news segment of the MedicCast podcast episode EMS Management of Pediatric Poisonings and Episode 225.