EMS Safety (WEMS-243-01)

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 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.
• Practitioner 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 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.