Your title will be CCT Paramedic but that really only entails about 15% of what you actually do at work. Most of the time (85%) you will be in the busy EC/ER grabbing sandwiches and juice for patients or doing their EKG, blood sugar checks, and walking patients to the bathroom that need help. They claim to promote professional development and don't mind if you study, but if you are studying between calls/ transports at work other employees will report you to management for not helping and you will get in trouble. Essentially, you will never have any downtime like in a normal EMS job. The protocols are good but you rarely get to use advanced skills because the ER attendings and residents do a great job of stabilizing patients prior to initiating transport. Another reason you don't use your skills is because it is a teaching hospital so if the attending isn;t doing something a resident is and if the resident doesn't do it then a medical student/ PA/ NP will, and despite the fact you might have more intubations then most of the residents no one will look to the CCT Paramedic to do what they are trained to. The pay isn't very good given the extra credential requirements and 36 hour work week that provides no built in overtime like other 48 work week EMS jobs. This team falls under the Emergency Center umbrella and is thus managed by Nurses, so you will always be viewed/considered nursing support staff in the eyes of the charge nurses and nurse managers. They are also almost always short staffed and managmnet sees the CCT team as a staffing resource so you will be double tasked on the days you are assigned to be on the ambulance, which I think is dangerous because it takes focus away from your supposed main job because you will get caught helping out in the EC when a STEMI patient rolls in and you can't check your pager/phone/ or be found which delays transport. You are not actually on call like in EMS, here you are expected to give 100% to being a CCT team member and 100% to being a blood culture tech at the same time. All of these issues have been expressed to management by multiple people and no significant changes have been enacted.
