03 - Ambulance Operations & Air Medical

Ambulance Operations and Air Medical is the third title of Action Training Systems' Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) series, and SkillsTrain, the authorised ATS distributor in South Africa, supplies it locally as part of that series. It covers the operational side of a call, getting the unit ready, running the response and handing a patient on, including when the helicopter is involved.

The title works through ambulance operations end to end: readiness checks before a shift, how a call is responded to, moving and transferring the patient, and how a call is properly terminated. It then turns to air medical services, when and how to call for a helicopter, how to set up a safe landing zone, how to approach an aircraft without being hurt, and how to prepare and load a patient for air transport. It is aimed at EMTs and crews who need the logistics of transport to be as disciplined as the clinical care.

The content follows the United States National EMS Education Standards at the EMT level, and As an ATS EMS title it belongs to a library that ATS accredits through CAPCE, the Commission on Accreditation for Prehospital Continuing Education, where each online interactive course carries one hour of continuing education and counts as Distributive Education under the NREMT National Continued Competency Program. It uses the same teach, test and track model as the rest of the ATS interactive range: a learner is assessed as they work through the material, and any section answered incorrectly is replayed before they can move on. The programme runs about 24 minutes and is supplied on USB or as a classroom streaming option, individually or as part of the complete 27-title EMT series.

Within the same EMT series, SkillsTrain also supplies Scene Safety and Management, Workforce Safety and Primary Assessment, so a service trains its crew against one consistent syllabus.