Development
ECAs at present have no clear career pathway of progression to technician or paramedic status and this has been widely discussed within many ambulance trusts. In the fourth quarter of 2008, West Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust announced progression for 80 ECAs to become emergency medical technicians in 2009. A large number of ECAs have since undertaken IHCD ambulance technician courses and many are now qualified technicians. West Midlands Ambulance Service has continued to offer technician courses throughout 2010, 2011 and 2012 to existing staff eligible to take them.
Some other ambulance Trusts that use the ECA role have begun to work on providing development for ECAs to become paramedics, using part-time higher education routes, such as the Open University. This is in line with the NHS "Skills Escalator" approach to staff development. It provides a development route for ECAs that are able to study (to a minimum of Higher Education Diploma), whilst remaining in employment, rather than becoming a full-time university student.
Read more about this topic: Emergency Care Assistant
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“I can see ... only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.”
—H.A.L. (Herbert Albert Laurens)
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)
“On fields all drenched with blood he made his record in war, abstained from lawless violence when left on the plantation, and received his freedom in peace with moderation. But he holds in this Republic the position of an alien race among a people impatient of a rival. And in the eyes of some it seems that no valor redeems him, no social advancement nor individual development wipes off the ban which clings to him.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)