The Paramedic Science Programme

John a paramedic student talks about the Paramedic Science Programme

I'm going to talk a little bit about the Paramedic Science program, what we do on the courses and what the course is like.

The first year of the course is mainly taken up by a module called Foundations of Paramedic Science. We also cover pathophysiology modules and communications modules.

Year two of the course is mainly taken up by a Paramedic Science module which is where you start to learn all your specific paramedic advance skills and you put those on top of all of the knowledge in clinical skills that you've learnt in the first year and the Foundations of Paramedic Science module.

The course is delivered several days a week we do normally morning lectures where we all sit down you have a normal lecture, a powerpoint presentation but we also go off and do a lot of research and teamwork tasks. Then we go for lunch and in the afternoon we have clinical skills session where we take all of that knowledge that we've learnt in the morning lecture and we put it into practice. So say we've been lectured on doing a respiratory assessment in the morning we'd then come down to the clinical skills rooms, set up very similar to the hospital wards and we actually do respiratory assessments which is obviously a fantastic way of getting that knowledge into your head and it's also very enjoyable to be able to practice those skills that you've been taught straight away.

The facilities that UWE have got here for our course are fantastic. There are several rooms set up like hospital wards. We use classrooms a lot as Paramedics we are never really in a hospital ward it's never all that easy to work so we tend to move around we don't worry about being on beds we just get down on the floor and do things realistically.

The same goes for our assessments when we do our basic life support and advanced life support assessments it's a five ten minute assessment where you go and you display your skills. Other than those the only assessment we've had is an essay which we did for communication skills and a presentation that we gave within the communication skills module as well.