By Art Hsieh
EMS1 Editorial Advisor
This week, public officials found more than 200 emergency medical technicians and paramedics purchased forged credentials in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, practicing emergency services without legitimate medical training.
Initially it was speculated the medics used the fake credentials to begin treating patients for the first time, but the recent investigation by public health officials found the responders bought the credentials to renew their state certification in at least a dozen communities including Boston, according to reports from The Boston Globe.
It is illegal to falsify emergency medical training records, and those with false certifications will be made to undergo the proper training to continue practicing, reports the Globe.
I’ve been following this story over the past few weeks since it was first reported. When reading the earlier stories, I remember wondering whether this was just the tip of an iceberg that would turn out to be much larger than expected. At this point it would appear to be so, which would be greatly disappointing to the profession.
Certification is a process in which an organization grants recognition to a person, organization, or device that meets certain criteria. In education, this means that the participant has to be able to meet a set of objectives in order to receive that certification.
For example, the professional level basic life support CPR card that you have in your wallet or file cabinet represents the recognition by an organization that you demonstrated satisfactory performance in both cognitive (knowledge) and psychomotor (skills) domains. This in turn means that you attended some type of training that required you to perform either a written test or skills evaluation. The instructor who taught your class was in turn certified to be able to perform this task.
The approach to creating a certification process is complex, and at times seemingly needless; however, this is because the amount of effort to ensure that the content being presented by the certification course is not only accurate and supportable by evidence, but also relevant to the task at hand.
To accomplish this, most certification processes require a large amount of input and feedback from a variety of stakeholders, not just a few individuals. This strengthens the certification process and provides validation that the certificate holder can in fact demonstrate that they have the knowledge and ability to perform the duties associated with the certification.
This is what makes cases like this so devastating to the public’s trust. Our communities assume that its emergency providers are suitably trained and prepared to perform the job. Certification (and licensure), while not perfect, is a way to validate that level of preparation. If all facets of this story are in fact true, it will point to a potentially community-wide mindset that somehow training is not that important to be prepared to do the job, and that getting training is in fact simply a hassle to put up with. That’s simply not acceptable in this day and age of the professional. What do you think?
Art Hsieh, MA, NREMT-P, is Chief Executive Officer & Education Director of the San Francisco Paramedic Association, a published author of EMS textbooks and a national presenter on clinical and education subjects.