A paramedic is a health care professional whose primary role is to provide advanced emergency medical care for critical and emergent patients who access the emergency medical system.
Not all ambulance personnel are paramedics. In English-speaking countries, there is an official distinction between paramedics and emergency medical technicians (or emergency care assistants), in which paramedics have additional educational requirements and scope of practice.
The paramedic role is closely related to other health care positions, especially the emergency medical technician, with paramedics often being on higher grade with more responsibility and autonomy following substantially greater education and training. The primary role of a paramedic is to stabilize people with life-threatening injuries and transport these patients to a higher level of care (typically an emergency department). Due to the nature of their job, paramedics work in many environments, including roadways, people's home, and depending on their qualifications, wilderness environments, hospitals, aircraft, and with SWAT teams during police operations. Paramedics also work in non-emergency situations, such as transporting chronically ill patients to and from treatment centers and in some areas, address social determinants of health and provide in-home care to ill patients at risk of hospitalization (a practice known as community paramedicine).
The role of a paramedic varies widely across the world , as EMS providers operate with many different models of care. In the Anglo-American model, paramedics are autonomous decision-makers. In some countries such as the United Kingdom and South Africa, the paramedic role has developed into an autonomous health profession. In the Franco-German model, ambulance care is led by physicians. In some versions of this model, such as France, there is no direct equivalent to a paramedic. Ambulance staff have either the more advanced qualifications of a physician or less advanced training in first aid. In other versions, such as Germany, paramedics do exist. Their role is to support the physician in the field, in a role more akin to a hospital nurse, rather than operating with clinical autonomy.
The development of the profession has been a gradual move from simply transporting patients to hospitals, to more advanced treatments in the field. In some countries, the paramedic may take on the role as part of a system to prevent hospitalization entirely and, through practitioners, are able to prescribe certain medications, or undertaking "see and refer" visits, where the paramedic directly refers a patient to specialist services without taking them to hospital.
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