Ornge, the not-for-profit ambulance service, has donated a decommissioned ambulance to Confederation College’s Primary Care Paramedic program.
Going forward, students on their way to a career in paramedicine will be able to train in a modern, up-to-date vehicle.
Rob Plummer, the coordinator for the paramedic program at the college, says the decommissioned ambulance is “a critical central piece to our program, that brings the level of our training up very, very high.”
Previously the program relied on an older ambulance that was already at the end of its service life.
“It was like a hand-me-down sort of thing. We were happy to have it, it helped for a number of years, but it got to the point where it’s no longer viable as a training vehicle,” says Plummer.
That’s where Ornge came in: the service has a long-running partnership with Confederation College, providing bursaries to students in aviation and paramedic programs.
Justin Pyke, the Director of Operations Programs and Performance with Ornge, explains that Confederation students often go on to work at Ornge, and that the ambulance program benefits from the college producing better-trained students.
“The education that they get at Confederation is really the foundation for everything that they build on from there, and a lot of that education is based around simulation, making that medical training as realistic as it can possibly be so that they can apply that effectively in the field,” Pyke remarks. “So to be able to support that kind of simulation through this donation is really exciting for us at Ornge.”
Pyke says Ornge jumped at the opportunity to fill the college’s need.
For Plummer, being able to use a physical ambulance makes a big difference compared to simply learning theory in the classroom.
“In the classroom you can discuss concepts, but you can never actually discuss the actual tactile,” he says. “By getting them into the ambulance, the front and back, loading, unloading into a real vehicle, driving it, feeling how it performs; it’s the G-force, it’s the ranges of where it starts to get a little bit tippy, it’s stopping ranges, are really critical for them to make that transition out onto the workforce. Because it makes them a lot safer.”
He adds that the new ambulance is state-of-the-art, with a hydraulic stretcher and conventional dimensions, offering students a more transferable skillset to the equipment they’ll be using in the field.
The paramedic program’s new ambulance will be used by about 60 or 65 students this year.
“As long as we have this ambulance — and we’re going to look after it and make sure we have it for at least a decade or more — there will be hundreds of students that will have access to this as part of their training,” says Shane Strickland, Associate Vice President, Academic for the college.
