JEDDAH, 23 September 2003 — Forty students have begun the first paramedic project in the Kingdom designed to produce graduates who meet the Department of Transport (DOT) standards in the USA. Those who complete the initial training in Jeddah will then undertake the DOT Paramedic course in the US.
“This is the first course of its kind in the Kingdom,” said Mohammed Al-Saddah, the training manager for the Makkah region. “The Red Crescent has teamed up with Mohammed Abdulatif Jameel, Chairman of Toyota in Saudi Arabia, who has committed himself to underwrite the project with considerable resources.”
New ambulances for the team, a GPS location network to dispatch and control them and a specialist medical helicopter and crew are also part of Toyota’s investment in the scheme.
Tom Notestine, a paramedic instructor from the University of California Los Angeles school of Pre-Hospital Medicine is the course manager. He has selected only proven talent for training.
“We selected the first 40 students through a tough selection procedure,” he said. “This is not a high-school entry course. The students all have between three and ten years EMT experience and have shown their dedication both to medicine and people who need help.”
The school is recruiting seven specialist instructors from the US and South Africa. They average 12 years experience in the field and are led by the head of a leading US paramedic school.
The standards for the DOT paramedic qualification are extremely high. “The training course, even for a UK paramedic, is about 400 hours and allows the administration of seven drugs and no narcotics,” Notestine said. “The DOT course, whose qualifications are accepted world-wide, is four times as long and qualifies the graduate in 37 different drugs. It is a very grueling course — and it has to be. In an emergency, you have to know what you are doing, it’s often a matter of life and death.”
In Jeddah, the students will combine academic, medical and English studies with experience in the field. “They are already used to the stress of emergency medicine,” said Notestine, “and the course will reinforce their developing skills with hands-on experience.”
The top ten or so students from the Jeddah-based course will pursue the rigorous 1,500-hour paramedic course in the US. “Some will be placed in the field and practice their skills, some will return to the school and begin training the next generation.”
The project is open ended and oriented toward continuous reinforcement. “Eventually, if we do our job right, the expatriate instructors will train themselves out of a role,” he said. “Highly competent Saudi instructors will teach a new generation of Saudi EMTs skills that will be useable anywhere.”
