EMS Safety

“NAEMT’s EMS Safety course teaches students how to protect themselves and their patients while on the job. It promotes a culture of safety and helps reduce the number of on-the-job fatalities and injuries. EMS Safety is the only national, comprehensive safety course for EMS practitioners. Its interactive format features real-life case studies and compelling discussions on current safety issues, and provides participants with a forum to share their own experiences. Critical thinking stations help build participants’ risk assessment and decision-making skills.

Participants are taught:

• To identify and remove the hazards that can appear during daily tasks, from offensive drivers to violent encounters to chronic stress.
• Practical strategies that they can apply in the field, from situational awareness to defensive driving to verbal deflection.
• How to strengthen their resiliency skills in order to combat both chronic and critical incident stress.

Topics covered include:

• Applying crew resource management in EMS.
• Utilizing situational awareness and defensive driving for safe emergency vehicle operations.
• Employing multi-agency pre-planning, vehicle and practitioner visibility techniques, and defensive staging practices at roadside incidents.
• Utilizing lift assist teams, lifting and moving equipment, and behavioral controls to protect both EMS practitioners and patients from injury.
• Employing situational awareness to continually assess for the potential of violence on the scene and verbal and physical techniques to deescalate potential threats.
• Practicing infection and contagion control to protect both EMS practitioners and patients from emerging threats.
• Strengthening resiliency skills to help EMS practitioners cope with daily and critical incident stress.
• Ensuring personal readiness for the daily challenges and hazards of working in the field through optimal personal health.

EMS Safety is offered as an 8-hour classroom course and is appropriate for all levels of EMS practitioners, other medical professionals providing prehospital patient care, and EMS supervisors and administrators. Students who successfully complete the course receive a certificate of completion and a wallet card good for 4 years. EMS Safety is accredited by CAPCE and recognized by NREMT.”