A cohort of local and regional firefighters graduated from a revived School of Medicine & Health Sciences paramedic program last month.
Twenty-three EMT firefighters in the D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services, Arlington County Fire and Manassas Fire and Rescue departments participated in a nearly 10-month paramedic training program that began last April, providing firefighters with the necessary skills to handle advanced medical emergencies and provide life-saving care before a patient arrives at the hospital. Faculty who led and designed the program, which hadn’t previously run since 2007, said its revamp fills the void of professional paramedics and training in the D.C. area.
Gretchen Wills, the program’s director, said officials divided the curriculum into miniature courses on preparatory topics in human body and systems, pharmacology, airway management, cardiology and medicine. She said students also did a collective thousands of hours of clinical rotations in the emergency, labor and delivery, psychiatric, pediatric and trauma surgery departments at GW Hospital, Children’s National Hospital and United Medical Center.
“It’s really elevating current, existing EMS providers and firefighters to that next level of patient care, and so now we’re turning people who were trained as technicians to be actual medical, critical thinking clinicians,” Wills said.
She said students received training on hazardous material response, scene safety, awareness of crime scenes, terrorism and disaster response. Wills said students constantly gained real-world experience by responding to 911 calls in the last six to seven weeks of the program, which served as a capstone field internship where students were the acting paramedics on dispatches with an instructor supervising them.
She said the program’s main goal was to create more minimum entry-level adequate paramedic candidates to resolve the shortage of paramedics in D.C. and surrounding areas. Fourty-one percent of part-time and thirty-five percent of full-time paramedic positions were vacant nationwide in 2024, according to a study by the American Ambulance Association.
“It was sort of like a very systematic prep to get existing EMT and firefighters in D.C., in Arlington and in Manassas, to go to that next level of certification, and again, to fill that desperate, high need for health care in the city,” Wills said.
Kat Ogle, an associate professor of emergency medicine, said GW’s original paramedic program began in 1986 due to concerns about the care patients were getting from EMTs, paramedics and first responders in D.C. She said the program shut down in 2007 due to restructuring at the University level.
Ogle said she spoke with regional EMS professionals in 2019 who expressed a need for high-quality paramedic education within D.C., but the pandemic brought discussions over a solution to a halt. She said the program’s steering committee, made up of members from the department’s faculty, SMHS and the GW Medical Faculty Associates began planning for the program in March 2022.
She said demand was high for paramedic programs in D.C. as the closest paramedic programs were several hours away in Virginia.
“As you could imagine commuting in the DMV, those are not simple transportation times, and most of these folks were also having to maintain their full-time jobs at the same time,” Ogle said.
Wills said elevating the training for first responders, like firefighters, will bring more paramedics to the field, creating a positive “ripple effect” by raising standards for EMTs as program graduates bring advanced knowledge and skills to their respective departments. She said if there are more highly trained paramedics on duty, patients will receive the necessary prehospital care needed and EMS departments will build public trust.
“We have helped to mold these humans into leaders in the community, and that has spilled over into their clinicals, and we’ve gotten really positive feedback from our clinical partners,” she said.
Wills said SMHS is planning on continuing the program, its next iteration beginning this May and graduating in April 2026 and the third cohort planning to begin before January 2026. The success of the program’s first cohort, with a 96 percent graduation rate, influenced the team to continue the program, she said, as well as the neighboring jurisdictions’ willingness and GW’s sponsorship of the paramedic program.
“We’ll be having two paramedic cohorts at the same time of 24 students each, where they’re going to overlap roughly every six months, we’ll have new enrollment into a new program,” she said.
Ogle said because each fire department sponsored their students, each department put their students on administrative duty to “go to school for work” so they could fully focus on their studies through the program.
Ogle said EMS agencies prescreened their candidates for professionalism, years of service and work performance, with each fire department having its own personal selection criteria and process, including written essays and forms, standardized testing and panel interviews. Many of the students in the program do not have extensive education experience and ranged in ages from 21 to 40 years old, with 65 percent of the first cohort coming from underrepresented minorities in medicine, Ogle said.
She added that the program will help improve quality patient care since studies have shown an increase in trust with patients when someone providing them care looks like them and comes from their community.
“They’re coming from local communities, and they’re going back directly to those communities to serve the patients that they see every day,” said Ogle. “For patients, being able to see someone who looks like you, take care of you is highly advantageous from the perspective of pride.”
She said transitioning from an EMT firefighter to a paramedic also brings a significant salary increase. The average salary of an EMT was $38,930 and $53,180 for a paramedic as of May 2023, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Edward Mills, the fire and rescue chief of the City of Manassas Fire and Rescue, said during Northern Virginia emergency response system chief meetings, there was a discussion about the demand for paramedics to recruit. He said EMS is a large portion of the entire health care system because those responders see patients before medical facilities do.
By sending highly trained paramedics, emergency officials will be more confident with treating patients in trauma cases and various illnesses, like sepsis, stroke and cardiac events, he said.
“If we’re not trained to be able to recognize these things and treat these things, then the chances decrease of what the hospitals are able to do when they get them,” Mills said. “We get them stabilized to give them the best chance of receiving medical care, definitive medical care at a medical facility, but us being able to stabilize then gives them the greatest chance of positive outcomes that can happen.”
