Your Paramedic is Peter Collins.
Peter served for ten years with the West Midlands Ambulance Service as an advanced paramedic. He is qualified to BSc level as an Emergency Care Practitioner and a Masters qualified Independent and Supplementary prescriber.
Peter has worked in Primary Care since October 2018 including 8 months working for the Warwick Hospital consultant led Community Frailty Team.
The role of paramedics working in primary care is a relatively new role within the Primary Care Network. They are qualified to assess, diagnose, medicate and refer patients presenting with a wide variety of presentations or medical conditions while supported by the duty doctor or assigned GP if needed.
As an advanced prescribing paramedic Peter can help manage acute patients presenting on the day as well as making home visits if requested.
Paramedics have a broad range of skills and understanding of medical conditions given their responsibility to attend, deal with, or treat any presentation triggered by a 111 or 999 call. They are autonomous practitioners operating both as part of a crew / team or as individuals. Peter often worked on the fast response car as well as a crew.
A paramedic will often experience anything and everything a patient can throw at them which could involve either an individual patient or multiple patients or a scene involving multiple patients, friends, relatives or bystanders. No one day is the same as another. A patient may present with a simple viral cold or minor fall at one end of the spectrum to someone who is in cardiac arrest or a life-threatening trauma. It includes all age ranges from someone who has sometimes sadly reached the end of their life in a home or care setting to delivering a newborn child to the world with an emergency birth. Mental health as well as physical presentations have also steadily grown in volume over the past decades and paramedics generally have intensive learned experience at managing.
In Primary Care paramedics have generally proven to adapt well to the new role. They work with and amongst other fellow professional clinicians in the Primary Care team and try to compliment and add to the service provided to patients that visit the surgery. We are part of a multidisciplinary team of professionals.