“Coming to” Paramedicine: Discursively Exploring How Paramedics “Choose” to Become a Paramedic

Contemporary emergency medical services and paramedics emerged out of the 1960s when attempts were made to professionalize a fledgling occupational group with the goal of instilling specialized medical knowledge and a variety of medical procedures and pharmaceutical interventions to “save patients and prevent further damage” in emergency situations (Swanson, 2005, p. 96, Campeau, 2008, p. 3). Only recently has the work of paramedics garnered serious sociological attention. This institutional ethnographic study explores the work of “becoming a paramedic.” In this presentation, we focus specifically on the discursive forces that shape the choices of deciding to become a paramedic and enter paramedic school. This study is organized as an institutional ethnography, a sociological theory/method of inquiry that emphasizes emergent design and discovery and that seeks to explore the “everyday” of individuals as they live, experience, and breathe the phenomenon under investigation. In the case of this research, institutional ethnography was used to explore the social organization of the education and training of paramedics in Canada. This presentation draws on over 55 in-depth interviews with paramedic students (all levels of training), instructors, preceptors, and others whose work interfaces with the education and training of paramedics throughout Canada and participants observations (full participant) of the researcher going through over 350 hours of paramedic training in an educational institution in Canada. This study is significant because it aims to give voice to students going through the process of becoming a paramedic and understanding how the work of becoming a paramedic is socially organized by using a theory/methodology – institutional ethnography – that drastically departs from dominant methods and paradigms deployed in EMS research to date.