Verde Valley Fire District has three more paramedics to add to its roster: Reserve Firefighter Heath Kuehne, Firefighter Pete Baile and Firefighter Jacob Marx. Each passed the 18-month 
EMT-to-Paramedic course offered though the Northern Arizona Healthcare Education Department and Coconino Community College.“My kids grew up and moved out,” eight-and-a-half-year VVFD veteran Baile said. “I thought I’d give it a shot. I’ve got time to do this now.”
It’s not all about having the extra time, though.According to Baile, VVFD will lose several paramedics to retirement in the next three years. To keep up with the requirement to have a paramedic on each Advanced Life Support ambulance that goes out on call, the department must seek replacements, either through a hiring process or by encouraging employed personnel to become certified as paramedics.
For the 45-year-old Baile, the education meant dedicating a lot of time to studying, the amount of which he stressed can’t be understated.
“It’s a lot of studying — lots and lots of studying. I wouldn’t have had time if I’d been going to softball games.”
The coursework, VVFD Chief Nazih Hazme said, is indeed grueling, even for men already certified as Emergency Medical Technicians. Added to their other duties with the district, the three men attended class once weekly, from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., which came out to 584 classroom hours. They also logged 500 additional hours of clinical and vehicular training, working in surgery, intensive care units, the emergency department, labor and delivery and pediatrics.
Riding along with approved paramedic-preceptors on ambulances and rescue units, Baile and his peers learned firsthand what it looked like to be paramedics.
But these descriptions are misleading, failing to convey just how much work is required. In addition to learning advanced medical procedures, paramedics are highly educated in topics such as anatomy and physiology, cardiology and medication dosage — allowing them to, in Hazime’s words, “literally bring the emergency room into people’s homes or other emergency scene.”
“The most difficult thing for a lot of us to remember was drugs and drug doses,” Baile said, adding that accounting for 50-plus medications and their counter-indications was a massive challenge. As of
Aug. 31, Baile had successfully passed his national registry computer test, allowing him to begin his shift officially as a paramedic.
Hazime said that the commitment to study amounted to a significant sacrifice — not only for the men themselves, but for their family and their coworkers. Time away from spouses and children, not to mention the back-filling VVFD needed to do to take up the slack created by the men’s absence, took its toll.
“It was a lot of off-duty studying and on-duty studying,” Hazime said. “They had to stay on track with the curriculum; they couldn’t get lackadaisical. Once they committed to the course, they were engaged …. Their accomplishment will add to our level of medic skills we currently provide to our community.”
In other VVFD news, the weekend of Aug. 6 and 7 saw the reserve academy completed, resulting in Tyrone Bell and Andrew Peterson’s shift qualification.
“The rest of the reserves are still working towards becoming shift qualified,” Hazime stated. “A big thank you to Captain Shaun McCallum and all the firefighters who put in lot of time to make sure this academy was a success.”
