By Violet Li
Clyde North Ambulance branch has welcomed a new fully qualified paramedic who just completed a 12-month graduate program.
The latest graduates to Advanced Life Support (ALS) paramedic ranks embraced a ceremony celebrating their completion of the Graduate Ambulance Paramedic (GAP) program on Sunday 19 May in Sunshine.
They are now located at branches in Belgrave, Seymour, Clyde North, Inglewood, Dallas, Sydenham, Hillside, Morwell, Tarneit, Winchelsea, and Point Cook.
GAP is a structured, on-road supervision and learning program for at least 12 months for students who completed their university degrees and want to become fully qualified ALS paramedics.
The program aims to help university graduates transition from the classroom to the “real world”, integrating into day-to-day team responsibilities and activities.
Clyde North’s new paramedic Madeline Green has found her experience with the GAP program challenging but very fruitful, supportive, and exciting at the same time.
“You’ve got a year of essentially practicing under supervision. You’ve got different tasks that you have to tick off and different skills that you have to demonstrate,” she said.
“You work with clinical instructors each month and they help you learn the ropes of everything and teach you how to use all the equipment and things like that.
“You basically consolidate all your knowledge with them across the 12 months.
“There’s so much study still involved. You think that you have finished the university, and you have everything that you need to know, but there’s still so much study that’s involved in those 12 months.”
Now a week into her new job in Clyde North, Madeline said she really liked treating actual patients.
“It was pretty daunting, but I had a really good clinical instructor, and she took charge for the first few days,” she said.
“I just got to watch how she did things and then slowly, I started to run the jobs and transition into me doing it.”
For Madeline, being a helping soul is in the family blood.
“Both my parents were nurses, and still are. So we always grew up at the dinner table with mom and dad talking about work and all these random health acronyms were getting thrown around,” she recalled.
“Me and my sister would just sit there being like, oh, this sounds cool, but we have no idea what’s going on.
“I found what they were talking about so interesting, so then I was like, I may as well go and do something similar.”
GAP has also been a gateway for making like-minded friends for new graduates like Madeline.
“I made heaps of friends. I was really lucky,” she said.
“I had a lot of other graduates that were starting. Either they were a few months ahead of me or a few months behind me.
“I’ve got a really good friendship group of girls and guys that I did my graduate year with, or they were my clinical instructors.
“We’re still friends now. It was a great way of meeting people.”
