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 manage 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 de-escalate 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 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.