Health Career Admissions
Program Code: G.EMA.CER
Graduation requirement: 5 credit hours
An EMT is a health professional whose primary focus is to respond to, assess, and triage emergent, urgent, and non-urgent requests for medical care and apply basic knowledge and skills necessary to provide patient care and medical transportation to/from an emergency or health care facility.
Depending on the patient’s needs and/or system resources, EMTs are sometimes the highest level of care patients will receive during ambulance transport. An EMT is often paired with higher levels of personnel as part of an ambulance crew or other responding group.
With proper supervision, an EMT may serve as a patient care team member in a hospital or health care setting to the full extent of the EMT’s education, certification, licensure, and credentialing. In a community setting, an EMT might visit patients at home and make observations reported to a higher-level authority to help manage a patient’s care.
When practicing in less populated areas, EMTs may have low call volume coupled with being the only care personnel during prolonged transports. EMTs may provide minimal supervision of lower level personnel. EMTs can be the first to arrive on scene; they are expected to quickly assess patient conditions, provide stabilizing measures, and request additional resources, as needed.
Emergency medical technicians:
- Function as part of a comprehensive EMS response, community, health, or public safety system with defined clinical protocols and medical oversight.
- Perform interventions with the basic equipment typically found on an ambulance (Recommended Essential Equipment for Basic Life Support and Advanced Life Support Ground Ambulances 2020: A Joint Statement Position Statement, 2021) to manage life threats, medical, and psychological needs.
- Are an important link within the continuum of the emergency care system from an out-of-hospital response through the delivery of patients to definitive care.
Graduates of this program are eligible to take the National Registry EMT cognitive exam.
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