The future of paramedic education: Problematizing the translucent curriculum in paramedicine.

Abstract

This article questions the extent to which paramedic education is adequate for a changing prehospital and ambulance world and to more advanced forms of professionalism. Paramedic training and education has increasingly moved out of in-service provision. In most Anglophone societies that feature similar models of prehospital medicine, the route to the qualification of new paramedics is through university degree programmes or college certification. This is an important route for professionalizing the paramedic occupation and has served to broaden the scope of practice and to boost the status of the paramedic. There remains much to do, however, in terms of modernizing and strengthening the provision of paramedic education. Drawing on the classic sociological notion of the hidden curriculum, this article argues that reform of paramedic education is an essential element in better preparing the paramedic profession for the future. Paramedic education needs to pivot away from its overwhelming emphasis on biomedical positivism and what we call the tyranny of the bio-psycho-medico in order to develop a more sociologically-informed curriculum that better prepares students for the realities of what they meet on the streets – a reality that better aligns with community paramedicine – in a changing society, and to provide scope for a more Socratic introspection of the nature, culture, structure, and ethics of the paramedic role itself.