Travel paramedics are part of the workforce solution healthcare desperately needs. Best Practice Medicine (BPM) created and is rapidly scaling the nation's first dedicated travel paramedic agency in support of ambulance and hospital operations nationwide.
Solving a few key issues, Best Practice Medicine opened a staffing bottleneck in 2021 allowing healthcare services to tap into an underutilized medical profession while giving more opportunities to paramedics. The success of this led BPM to establish a full-time dedicated division that focuses on the recruitment, education, and placement of travel paramedics in hospitals and EMS agencies in more than seventeen states. To date, this department has managed more than a thousand travel paramedics in assignments ranging from major healthcare/hospital systems, governmental EMS and Fire Agencies, union organizations, private services, and others.
There is a broad range of travel options for other healthcare professionals (nurses, physicians, etc…), and a massive infrastructure built around them; there has never been an equivalent in the field of paramedicine. By solving challenges with licensure, cost, orientation times, and scope of practice Best Practice Medicine began to educate, connect and place travel paramedics in both Hospitals and EMS agencies nationwide. This allowed our team to mobilize an invisible healthcare workforce and set the groundwork for the emerging, permanent field of travel paramedicine.
Historically invisible to the general public, media, and healthcare, the quiet profession of paramedicine ensures that when a 911 call is placed, the world’s most sophisticated safety net delivers an equipped, educated medical professional. These healthcare providers are members of a subspecialty of medicine born in the 1970s to address the need for high-quality care in difficult circumstances.
Travel paramedics are healthcare professionals, licensed as paramedics, with significant experience who participate at their full scope of practice and knowledge as members of healthcare teams on a temporary basis. Travel paramedics typically take assignments of at least 90 days, filling open shifts either in the hospital or emergency medical services setting.
Travel paramedicine is distinct from the more classical use of paramedics in times of emergency or disasters. There are long-standing and accepted methods and models, such as ambulance strike teams, and governmental disaster organizations, like FEMA that typically fill the pre-hospital role of emergency medical services and medical transport in an emergency. The role, operation tempo, structure, and duration of these services are different from travel paramedicine.
The field of travel paramedicine is rapidly emerging as an excellent resource to fill open clinical team member positions in hospitals, healthcare facilities, and emergency medical service agencies alike.
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