To help deal with a widespread shortage of paramedics, AMED recently bought two SUVs that enable the organization to deploy roving paramedics to emergencies where needed, while avoiding situations that emergency medical technicians alone can handle.

Now AMED is planning another strategy to help with the paramedic shortage: courses at its own training center in Lakemont that will turn some EMTs into an advanced version of that type of emergency responder.

“Advanced EMTs” can’t do everything that paramedics can do, but they can do more than regular EMTs, including administration of nitroglycerin for heart patients, application of 12-lead electrocardiograms and intravenous startups — although not intubations or chest decompressions with a needle, like paramedics, AMED Executive Director Gary Watters said at a board meeting Monday.

“(AEMTs) can handle a good chunk of our calls,” Watters said. “It frees up paramedics to go to other, higher level calls.”

Thanks to the establishment of the training center, AMED now has extra EMTs on staff, he said.

Within the next few weeks, the organization hopes to qualify the training center to teach advanced EMT lessons, so AMED can take six of those EMTs “off line” and put them through a six-week, 40-hours-per-week course, for which they’ll get paid their regular wages, Watters said.

When they’re done, they’ll get promoted and get a bump in pay, he said.

AMED already has six advanced EMTs, all of whom got their advanced training elsewhere.

Getting the necessary 240 hours now is a challenge, he said.

It means going to Curwensville or Harrisburg two nights a week over six or seven months, he said.

AMED would eventually like to have 20 advanced EMTs on staff.

Currently there are 34 full-time and 10 part-time EMTs in the organization, Watters said.

There are 16 paramedics, along with three part-time pre-hospital registered nurses, whose training level exceeds that of paramedics.

“I think we’re in a pretty good spot now,” Watters told the board.

Harrisburg’s ambulance service staffs all its ambulances with advanced EMTs and has its paramedics “running between them,” Watters said.

Watters hopes eventually to be able to begin paramedic training in Lakemont.

“We’re working toward it,” he said.

But it’s expensive — “tens of thousands of dollars” — because the accreditation needed is like that for a college, he said.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.