Photo Courtesy of David Pike
Last December, UTRGV and Texas State Technical College in Harlingen partnered together to help physician assistant students with special training in medical emergency services to excel in their health-care education.
Both schools signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU), which aims at ensuring educational experience for physicians assistant students at UTRGV and emergency medical services (EMS) paramedic students at TSTC.
Chair for UTRGV Department of Physician Assistant Frank Ambriz outlined the lab access for TSTC EMS paramedic students per the agreement.
“(TSTC students) will have the ability to come into our cadaver lab with our faculty and get some minimal training on the cadavers related to their studies both in the emergency medicine program they have, which is the EMT program for the paramedics and the EMTs and the surgical techs that they train.” Ambriz said.
Ambriz said the agreement includes free certification classes, in which TSTC will give UTRGV physician assistant students training during summer sessions in advanced cardiac life support (ACLS) and basic life support (BLS).
“The first year is in the classroom, the second year is in the clinical rotations outside of the campus, but before they get into the clinical rotations, they have to be certified in advanced cardiac life support and basic life support,” Ambriz said. “Most of them will get them done before they even start the program, but the majority of them do not have advanced cardiac life support and they have to take it while they are in the program before they start their clinical rotations. This partnership will provide that advanced cardiac life support training at a very minimal cost.”
Dean of the College of Health Professions at UTRGV Michael Lehker said he expects physician students to work together.
“I think this collaboration between institutions, where different programs work together, can be really seen as interprofessional or inter-collaborative education,” Lehker said.“And once they go into the professional health-care fields, they will translate that into real-patient outcomes.”
Lehker said this is the first time UTRGV shares physical resources with a different institution.
“I think that it is really important to do that because things are so costly,” he said. “So, if institutions can come together and share their resources, we will have a much better education for our students.”
This is Celeste Cruz for Vaquero Radio.
