Recertification is a two-yearly process, where the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians (NREMT) expects all AEMTs to show they’ve taken steps to improve and enhance their knowledge. You’ll need to commit a minimum amount of time to ongoing education and study through a recognized AEMT recertification online course or alternative study program, which can feel like a daunting prospect!
AEMTs need to fit in fifty hours of evidence-based study to achieve recertification. Whether you’re recertifying for the first time or have found that your next deadline has rolled around faster than you’d realized, it’s nonetheless a sizable chunk of time to try and carve out if you’re already working full-time.
Let’s work through some tried-and-tested tips from The Paramedic Coach to give you all the tools you need to fly through recertification–including using flexible online programs to study on demand, giving yourself ample time, and ensuring you treat recertification as an essential element of progressing your knowledge and career.
Tip 1: Check Your AEMT Recertification Course Is Accredited
Step one is to make 100% sure you’re using an official, recognized course that the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians (NREMT) will accept. Unfortunately, recertification applicants can be rejected, but that’s usually because one element of their continuing education doesn’t meet the standards or because they’ve repeated a module somewhere along the line.
Applicants often have difficulty finding AEMT recertification courses that meet every requirement, but our program is available at all levels and is completely CAPCE-accredited. This simply means you know all your AEMT recertification study is covered in one course, we’ve included every essential content component–there is no likelihood you’ll find yourself going back to the drawing board.
Tip 2: Verify the Continuing Education Hours You Need to Achieve AEMT Recertification
We touched on the minimum continuing education hours above. To clarify, you’ll need to complete fifty hours of approved AEMT-level study, with documentation to prove you’ve covered the requisite hours every two years.
A frequent mistake is to assume these hours are the only requirement and that you can study pretty much any content or topic that you feel is relevant to your role or applicable to the emergency medical sector. In contrast, you’ll need to split your study into national, local, and individual components–something we’ve incorporated into our recertification program design. If you’re using an alternative recertification course or a DIY approach, we’d strongly advise you to double-check the standards and content elements.
Tip 3: Break Down and Schedule Your Study Hours and Content Components
Thinking about how you’ll fit in multiple hours of education alongside your work, family, and personal commitments can feel overwhelming. The best advice we’d give is to avoid considering it a mammoth task and split the study into manageable, smaller tasks that won’t cause too much stress.
For example, if you need to complete fifty hours of continuing education as an AEMT and enroll in the recertification program from The Paramedic Coach, you’ll have a full twelve months of on-demand access to work through the content as fast or slow as you feel comfortable. You might break that into one hour a week, for instance, over the next fifty weeks, which is far easier to tackle–making sure you’ve blocked out that space in your schedule and have set aside time without interruptions to ensure you’re not repeating modules multiple times.
Tip 4: Start the AEMT Recertification Process Early to Give Yourself Plenty of Time
It’s human nature to leave non-urgent tasks until they become more critical, but when it comes to professional study, this isn’t a strategy we’d recommend. To gain all the AEMT recertification course benefits, it’s better to allocate sufficient time to embed new learning.
Focusing on the program matters because, after each video lesson, you’ll be asked to complete a quiz to check you’ve understood the content, know how to apply it in the field, and have met the benchmarks for recertification.
Booking a week off just before your recertification deadline isn’t a great plan, and we’d suggest using an approach like the one we’ve outlined above. If you get stuck or find a particular lesson a little trickier, you’ll have no issues repeating it or watching it through again before moving on.
