National Registry Question

[Guest guest]

As part of my homework for my paramedic class I was told to figure out what

National Registry considers as " load & go " situations for medical and trauma. I

have looked at th National Registry website and can not find this information.

Can anyone out there help me on this. Thanks in advance.

[Guest guest]

Answers to questions on the National Registry tests come from the current

editions of leading EMS text books. Therefore, there is no such thing as the

National Registry's definition of what constitutes a load & go situation, just

as there is no National Registry definition of what constitutes a MI, head

injury, or asthma attack.

The National Registry uses quite an involved process to vet the questions they

use on exams. While preparing to transition from written tests to computer

adaptive testing, the National Registry invited persons from all over the U.S.

to their offices to participate in multiple sessions to review questions. These

sessions identified questions that could be immediately used for CAD testing,

tweaked some, discarded some and sent some to be rewritten. I participated in

one of these groups. There were about 14 - 16 of us who reviewed almost 1,000

EMT-I level questions. I was there because my agency makes extensive use of

EMT-Is. As best I can remember the group also included: two persons from

diverse areas of the country who had just taken the Registry EMT-I test,

including one who had passed it on the 2nd attempt; two State EMS Directors; an

urban EMS director from Minnesota, I think; a rural EMS director; a person

involved in EMS, I can't remember in what capacity, from Wyoming; Ohio's State

EMS Medical Director, who had been hired just a few weeks prior; an EMT-I

instructor; Bill Brown, Director of the National Registry; & I don't remember

the others.

To review the questions, we all sat around a conference table. The Registry

staff had prepared pages of test questions written just as they had been on the

written tests. We read the questions to ourselves and determined if there was a

distractor that was correct. When it was our turn we stated the letter of the

distractor we thought was the correct answer. If no one disagreed we went on to

the next person. On almost all of the questions there was only one clearly

correct answer. A few questions had one clearly correct answer & another

distractor that was almost correct. VERY few questions had one correct answer

and two almost correct distactors.

Getting back to the question regarding the National Registry definition of a

load & go situation... As we reviewed the questions, occasionally one or more

of the group disagreed on what was the correct answer. On one circuit around

the table, the question that fell to me to answer was one that I simply did not

know ! On such occassions, the group discussed the question and answers. If

the group discussion indicated that one of the distactors was clearly correct

and the stem was clearly written, we went on to the next question. Other

questions were discussed. On several questions we asked the EMT-I students what

they had been taught, and the EMT-I instructor what she teaches to help

determine if the question was adequately written or should be changed. On a few

questions, we went to the text books on the shelf to determine if the question

and/or distractors were acppropriately or correctly written.

In summation: 1) This group comprised of geographically diverse people who

likely did not acquire their knowledge from the same EMS text, agreed on the

answers to the test questions. 2) There is no " National Registry definition "

of anything that is the subject of a test question.

>

> As part of my homework for my paramedic class I was told to figure out what

National Registry considers as " load & go " situations for medical and trauma. I

have looked at th National Registry website and can not find this information.

Can anyone out there help me on this. Thanks in advance.

>