EMS Safety

NAEMT’s 3rd edition EMS Safety course teaches students how to protect themselves and their patients while on the job. It promotes a culture of safety and helps reduce the number of on-the-job fatalities and injuries. EMS Safety is the only national, comprehensive safety course for EMS practitioners. Its interactive format features real-life case studies and compelling discussions on current safety issues, and provides students with a forum to share their own experiences. Course activities allow students to apply critical thinking and best safety practices to EMS scenarios.

Students are taught to:

• Identify and manage the hazards that can appear during daily tasks, from offensive drivers to violent encounters to chronic stress.
• Describe and apply the principles of crew resource management in EMS.
• Apply techniques to maintain safe vehicle operations.
• List and assess strategies to apply in the field that improve patient safety.
• Identify strategies to ensure practitioner safety.
• Strengthen resilience skills and focus on personal health to combat both chronic and critical incident stress.

Topics covered include:

• How safety impacts patients and practitioners, from maintaining a culture of safety in changing situations to communication and documentation strategies.
• Crew resource management in EMS, modeling effective communication, maintaining situational awareness, and a being an effective member of a team.
• Emergency vehicle safety including maintenance and inspection considerations, responsibilities of due regard, defensive driving techniques, and common causes of vehicle collisions and strategies to avoid them.
• Safety in the roadway, including multi-agency pre-planning, vehicle and practitioner visibility techniques, and defensive staging practices.
• Patient safety, strategies to identify and prevent common patient errors, just culture, and safe handling techniques for all patients.
• ractitioner safety, situational awareness, and verbal, physical, and chemical techniques to deescalate potential threats.
• Injury and infection prevention and control.
• Practitioner personal health, resilience skills, and ensuring personal readiness for the daily challenges and hazards of working in the field.

EMS Safety is offered as an 8-hour classroom course and is appropriate for all levels of EMS practitioners, other medical professionals providing prehospital patient care, and EMS supervisors and administrators. Students who successfully complete the course receive a certificate of completion and a wallet card good for 4 years. EMS Safety is accredited by CAPCE and recognized by NREMT.

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