International Roundtable on Community Paramedicine Approaches a Decade

It’s been nine years since the International Roundtable on Community Paramedicine was established. And though the idea of community paramedics has evolved a bit since, it’s fair to say that healthcare in North America has now finally caught up to the IRCP’s vision.

The loose-knit organization’s first meeting back in 2005 gathered delegates from the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K. in Nova Scotia—then the only site in North America known to be practicing community paramedicine—to talk about better integrating rural EMS providers into their healthcare delivery systems.

Now the focus has moved beyond just rural, and CP, by itself and as part of mobile integrated healthcare efforts, is being widely and enthusiastically embraced across systems of all sorts.

“I think the writing was on the wall a couple years ago, when more people started to get active in this, that it was going to spread,” says IRCP chair Gary Wingrove, director of government relations and strategic affairs at Minnesota’s Gold Cross/Mayo Clinic Medical Transport. “But the rate at which it’s spreading is encouraging, and maybe a bit surprising,”

The IRCP’s 10th annual conference will be held Sept. 2–5 at the Atlantis Casino Resort in Reno. Besides a curriculum that examines areas like program implementation, metrics, research and technology, and alignment with the IHI’s Triple Aim, the event brings perspectives from those other pioneering countries (in fact it rotates among them) and this year was to be preceded by a preconference clinical experience Aug. 24–Sept. 1 at Burning Man. That provided an up-close taste of frontier medicine for those who got to Nevada early, but community paramedicine has long since emerged from the hinterlands to thrive in cities too. The IRCP originally included and Rural Healthcare Delivery with its name, but dropped that more than five years ago as urban programs emerged.

“When we first started IRCP, we were trying to create a way of helping solidify volunteer and rural ambulance services,” says Wingrove. “We thought that if we could create something that used an existing skill set in a different way, then reimbursement opportunities might someday follow. The other reason we did it that way was, we know you can fairly easily take something developed for a rural context and adapt it to an urban place, but it’s harder to do that in the other direction. It was important to us, as IRCP grew, that more and more partners could start participating.”

That they’re doing; this year’s conference drew roughly double the usual number of speaker proposals. The agenda has strong international representation, which “gives people the opportunity to interact with people from other places and hear about how healthcare is different in other countries, including EMS,” says Wingrove. “That’s an important piece of this.”

The IRCP isn’t a heavily structured organization. It has no officers, staff, formal membership or dues. It’s open to anybody who wants to show up and take part. Newcomers can start with its monthly conference calls; to get registered, see https://ircp.info and https://ircp.info/Meetings/Call-Registration. For more on this year’s show, see https://remsa-cf.com/ircp.html.