Does Patient Age Affect a Student’s Opportunity to Be a Team Leader?

Introduction: Students must act as team leads in the field to successfully graduate from their paramedic program. The team leads allow the student to develop technical skills, scene management skills, and nonclinical skills. However, there are times when the student as a team lead has the leadership role taken over by the preceptor. In previous research it was shown there was a correlation between the acuity of the patient and preceptors taking control of the call.

Objectives: To determine if the age of the pediatric patient affected the student’s ability to complete team leads; to determine if the criticality of the pediatric patient affected the student’s ability to complete team leads; to determine if the criticality and the age of the pediatric patient affected the student’s ability to complete team leads. 

Methods: The methodology for this research includes data from student field time from January 2010 to December 2018 from paramedic students with accounts in Fisdap, an Internet-based administrative database. SPSS was used to conduct a descriptive analysis and represented as chart and tables.

Results: Paramedic students were team leaders for 68% of all patient interactions. For pediatric patients the rate of the student as the team leader dropped to 38% (p<0.00). The likelihood of the paramedic student functioning as the team leader was lower as the patient’s age decreased. When patient acuity was factored in, all age groups had the same rate of team leads by the paramedic student when the patient was deemed a “green.” However, paramedic students had almost no opportunities to function as the team leader for pediatric patients with higher acuities.

Conclusions: We hypothesized that the age of the patient would also affect the likelihood of students being team leaders. Paramedic students had fewer opportunities to function as team leaders on pediatric patients, particularly in the younger age groups (infant, toddler). The results suggest paramedic students do not get opportunities to function as team leaders for pediatric patients, and even less so on high-acuity pediatric patients.