Story by JOSH GRAY
Photo by ERIK MEDINA
In 2013, Pima Community College was given the opportunity to bid for a five-year contract titled Air Force Medical Operations Agency.
Sharon Hollingsworth, program manager, was one of the first to try and get Pima’s first five-year contract.
“Her leadership and experience and knowhow has been key to our success,” said Nate Gonzalez, academic director of Public Safety and Security.
“One of the real innovative components to this contract is that it’s really built on partnerships,” said David Dore, Downtown Campus president.
That contract between the United States Air Force and Pima College was to give initial paramedic training to Air Force personnel. The course averaged 60 students per year.
Paramedic training takes, on average, between 6 to 11 months to complete. The contract was created to basically accelerate this process and be six days a week, within a four-month time span, twice a year.
That contract ended in September of 2018.
Through a group effort, Pima College was again selected to hold the paramedic training.
This new contract called “AFMOA II” is a bit different from the last five-year contract.
AFMOA II has a few changes due to the critiques of students and Pima College’s excellent performance and final exam scores.
“We’re very proud of the success rates on those exams, that our success rates are above the national and the state levels,” Dore said.
The initial paramedic training course will be extended to span over 4.5 months, which gives the students a little extra time for completion.
There is also a new refresher paramedic training course, which is a two-week course that will last throughout the five-year contract.
“The Air Force has also requested us to take care of the refreshers. The good news there, its a two-week program, there’s gonna be more of them because we’re expected to train up to 100 personnel for refresher training,” Gonzalez said.
Like many of the other courses given at Pima, the paramedic training course is built as a workforce instructor model.
“Our instructors that are paramedics; firemen and so forth, from different local agencies and they’re still actively working … bringing real world experiences and events that have happened,” Gonzalez said.
The paramedic program from AFMOA II is only available to the United States Air Force personnel. Currently, there are 20 students that the Air Force is paying for to take this course.
There is, however, a second paramedic course offered to regular Pima students called “Shift Friendly.” This paramedic course goes from January to November.
“The reason they call it ‘Shift Friendly’ is because we fully realize that there is a lot of emergency medical technicians that are working out there for different companies, that because of there shifts can sometimes not come to a course on a Monday, this allows them to come on a Tuesday or it allows them to come on another day of the week,” Gonzalez said.
The paramedic course does take a little bit longer than the others, but it only meets three days a week, so it can work around the students’ schedules.
The Air Force paramedic course is being held at the 29th Street Coalition Training Center, which is only about five minutes from Davis-Monthan Air Force base. This makes it a prime location to hold all of the paramedic training for Air Force personnel.
The facilities, which was once an elementary school, holds all of the equipment needed to teach the course.
The instructors have a different technology to help provide as much hands-on training as they possibly can. One new piece of technology the course gain is called the Anatomage.
“A digitized dissection table, so instead of students cutting into human cadavers, we have the ability of them to actually look at a human being on a digital scale,” said Chris Christensen, workforce trainer.
The building also houses a replica of an ambulance, multiple synthetic dummies and simulation rooms for different scenarios that could happen out in the real world.
“The bottom line for us, as a community, and that’s why I think we’re very privileged and honored to be training the Air Force attendees, is that the Air Force personnel are not only going back to working at their own clinics and hospitals that are state signed or overseas, but many of them also get deployed to the Middle East and other hotspots around the world… so it’s important that we from Pima’s perspective train to the highest level,” Gonzalez said.