Thomson Delmar Debuts Online EMT-B Refresher

If you're in a rural agency and have to travel long distances for refresher training, or in an urban department so busy it's hard to get away, distance education may be your solution. Specifically, more and more providers are taking advantage of a growing array of courses and training offered online.

To the ranks of these comes the new EMT-Basic training/refresher course from learning provider Thomson Delmar. The course offers a system of assessing and enhancing users' current EMT-B skills and provides training toward recertification.

"The benefits include not only the anytime/anywhere aspect of being able to take the course in the station or at home, but also the cost savings a department can realize by not having to send EMTs to [off-site] refresher training," says Maureen Rosener, the company's acquisitions editor for healthcare.

The course's 24 hours of content were assembled by Jim Miller, EMS programs manager for the U.S. Army, and are based on the Delmar's core EMT-B textbook Fundamentals of Emergency Care. Seven content modules-preparatory, airway, assessment, medical/behavioral, trauma, obstetrics/infants/children and operations-correspond directly to the U.S. DOT national standard EMT-B refresher curriculum. The system is geared for agencies and departments, rather than individuals, with multi-level data-collection tools and security features to protect test scores and other student information.

"The biggest advantage we're seeing is the whole back-end learning management system," says Rosener. "Because the product is so robust, training coordinators can collect data at a state level, an agency level or perhaps just a department level. They can look at the progress of a particular EMT, right down to the questions they're getting right or wrong, or at their training program as a whole. If everybody's getting certain pieces of information wrong, there might be a hole in their training."

Accreditation by the Continuing Education Coordinating Board for EMS was anticipated by the time this issue goes to press. To view a demo of the product, visit www.ems.delmar.com. For more information, call 800/998-7498, ext. 2557.

-JE