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There have been several attempts to figure out what factors can help predict which students will pass the infamous National Registry exam; hopefully, programs somewhere are using this data to design their classes in such a way as to maximize student success.  (Meanwhile, other programs will fail miserably.  I’ve heard terrible things about what’s become of the program I attended, which wasn’t spectacular to begin with.)

While we’ve been assuming for many years that patient contact was indeed important for learning, we finally have numbers to show that high patient volumes are as good for test performance as they are for street performance.  The number of hours spent, either in the field or in the hospital, had no correlation with passing rates.  (I was one of the last classes under the old paramedic curriculum, and our criteria for hospital exposure was based on hours, not patients.)

Here is the graph from the study for total patient contacts, but the graph with “number of ALS runs” on the X-axis is even more impressive.

Filed under: EMS Research