Overview

Our reputation for providing a high-quality, innovative paramedic education means that you gain the skills, knowledge and experience you need to be eligible to register as a paramedic with the Health and Care Professions Council.

From September 2020 all new and continuing students on this course will receive a £5,000 maintenance grant each year if they’re eligible. They will not need to pay it back.
Full details here

This degree ensures that you have the depth of knowledge, skills and experiences to be a highly skilled autonomous practitioner able to confidently assess, prioritise, transfer, manage, treat, refer and discharge service users in the community.This course delivers an equal balance of theoretical and practical learning.

Throughout the course, as part of the placement experience, you will be required to participate in a shift pattern rota or work weekends. You are exposed to a unique range of practice placements comprising 60 weeks in total throughout the duration of the course.

Practice placements reinforce taught elements allowing you to apply theory within practice, gain valuable practical experience and prepare for the role of a modern paramedic. Within a practice setting all students are supernumerary, ensuring maximum exposure to the role of the paramedic and patient care episodes. A qualified practice educator supports your learning and help you develop your knowledge and skills in practice.

We have ongoing approval from the Health and Care Professions Council, a multi-professional regulator that sets the minimum standards of education and training proficiency for 16 separate professional groups including paramedics. This ensures successful graduates become competent, autonomous professionals prepared for the demands of 21st century out-of-hospital healthcare.

The School is committed to the development of quality courses and to the enhancement of the student experience. To that end the Student Voice is central to the design and delivery of the learning experience. We invite you to provide feedback at key points in your student journey and ensure that we respond to your feedback through our 'you said, we did' approach.

Course details

Theory is vital to provide you with the knowledge, understanding and critical decision-making skills you need as a paramedic. The modules you study across the three years enable you to develop knowledge and put it into your practice placements to enhance and develop your skills as you make an immediate and continuing contribution to service user care. You also develop enhanced communication, personal and professional skills.

You will be able to confidently take a history from a service user to assess their needs and prioritise care; formulate a management and treatment plan; refer service users to other healthcare providers or professionals and, in a significant number of cases, offer care at home, advice and guidance and promote healthy interventions and conversations with service users, carers and their family. You continually develop your clinical decision-making and complex-problem solving skill, and support service users navigating and interpreting healthcare information and clinical guidance; and offer advice from your well-developed understanding of evidence-based practice.

Care, compassion and commitment to high-quality care are essential skills. We support your development as a clinical leader and key decision maker as we develop your professional skills and understanding of the wider healthcare network in practice placements. Your practice placements are in a variety of emergency care placements (hosted by ambulance services) and community placements (hospitals, community bases and other areas) such as intensive care,, GP surgeries, urgent care centres, mental health teams, children services and more. These practice placements provide an opportunity to embed yourself in a wide range of healthcare settings and to network with other healthcare professionals, ensuring your service users access the best and highest quality of care provided by you or other healthcare professionals at the right time, by the right person at a convenience place to suit them.

If you need more information to get a real sense of what it’s like to be a Teesside University paramedic student just ask our students – we're on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Get to grips with the basics of anatomy and physiology – anatomical names for bones, structures and how they work and interact with each other. This forms the basis of how the human body works (like the cardiovascular system, respiratory system) how it should work normally, and how and why it sometimes doesn't. You explore what can go wrong and the impact of lifestyle, infection, disease, chronic long-term illness (such as diabetes) and acute illness (chest infection, myocardial infarction) on the body.

Foundation of Professionalism and Academic Practise for Paramedics

This module explores what it means to be a professional and how to act, think, feel and make professional decisions. We look at the role of the regulator – the Health and Care Professions Council – and how it protects patients, paramedics and the wider NHS, and how paramedics can make a contribution to the wider healthcare network. You also explore the law in relation to medicine and ethics with some case studies and group discussions.

Introduction to Essential Skills and History Taking for safe Paramedic Practise

You learn how to use and access equipment to help you make a diagnosis or inform your decision about how to manage a service user or formulate a management plan. Skills such as taking a pulse, blood pressure, inserting a cannula, managing an airway, using a stethoscope or a heart monitor to help diagnose a myocardial infarction. You gain confidence in using all types of equipment and develop practice skills to support your diagnosis and treatment plans.

You start to learn how to take a comprehensive patient history to prioritise care and management of the service users you assess. All of the practice placement learning sits in this module. You are out in practice for 750 hours (20 weeks) in emergency care and community placements, putting all of theory you have learned in Year 1 into practice. First-year placements include spending time developing your caring skills in a ward area or nursing home, emergency care in an ambulance, critical care (ITU, HDU, emergency department) and patient assessment areas (GP practice, urgent care centres).

Introduction to  Evidence-based Practise for Paramedics

You focus on academic writing, referencing and reflecting on learning styles, and are introduced to the principles of evidence-based practice (EBP) and to explore the role of EBP in the current context of paramedic practice. You also gain an insight in to the research process and the most common methodologies.

Paramedics Practise Assessment: part 1

The skills and knowledge you gain on this module will enable you to practice competently and safely, appropriate to the first year of study. Skills developed include decision making, assessment, and care for service users in a range of placement areas. On placement you are required to attend an average of 37.5 hours per week, including weekends and unsocial hours. Placements are integral to this module and are in paramedic and non-paramedic contexts. They have been informed by the College of Paramedics education framework to enable you to gain a wider understanding of the complex decisions and care you will be required to manage.

How you learn

You learn by attending key lectures, seminar groups, small study groups, practical sessions and e-learning. You're also expected, as an adult learner, to carry out significant and additional self-directed study to enhance and complement your learning. Occasionally this will be directed study where the module leader will set an individual or group task or problem to solve. All your learning is delivered by expert lectures, practitioners and researchers. Practice placements are a large part of this programme and you are expected to negotiate and work with a supervisor (known as a practice educator) to help you develop your knowledge, skills and understanding for practice.

How you are assessed

As you would expect there are examinations, essays to write, presentations to do either as an individual or in a group, and practical exams referred to as objective structured clinical exams. A variety of assessment methods ensures we have a wide range of learning styles, so that no student is disadvantaged. You're also assessed in practice using a practice assessment document. Your practice mentor to assess your competencies and skills, demonstrating your ability to perform the role of a paramedic. The assessment methods follow the academic escalator. In Year 1 you are expected to describe and explain, in Year 2 critically analyse and in Year 3 evaluate your knowledge, skills and understanding for practice.

Career opportunities

You find paramedics in a wide variety of roles and organisations ranging from public bodies, such as the NHS, to more commercially-focused organisations outside the NHS.

Paramedics can be found in emergency departments, urgent care centres, GP surgeries, helicopter emergency services, harzardous area response teams (HART), cruise liners, in the community as part of the medical team, in events companies, search and rescue, close protection and working for the government, and arm’s length bodies such as Atos. They are also found in research roles in education, teaching pre-registration paramedic programmes, as consultants leading the profession in organisations, and in lead allied health professional roles both locally and nationally.

A large proportion of paramedics are employed by NHS ambulance services, voluntary organisations such as St John Ambulance or the British Red Cross, in traditional roles on ambulances, rapid response cars, in HART teams and in other specialist or advanced roles, clinical leadership or education roles in those organisations. If you choose to work for an NHS ambulance service they currently require a driving licence and that you meet the requirements of other Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency regulations.

Your career is very open and varied on qualification. In addition to post-qualifying roles the University also supports additional and enhanced qualifications to further your career in specialist, advanced and consultant roles through postgraduate qualifications such as PgC, PgDip, master’s and professional doctorate qualifications which may further enhance and develop your career in clinical leadership and management.