Have you ever really looked at an RN's education? There is virtually no critical thinking taught in RN programs, and in fact I would argue that medics get more of this than RN's get. RN training is littered with nursing care plans and a whole lot of complete BS that most nurses will tell you helped them zero! I can tell you that docs NEVER read the nursing care plans in the chart because they are complete trash. There are some places in the hospital where the nurses routinely save our a$$, like the ICU, the ED, but on regular floors, most nurses are about as far away from critical thinking as you can get. If you get down to it, remove all the BS pre-reqs (science for nursing majors courses, English, History, etc..etc...), all the nursing theory and care plan courses, and focus on the pathophys and true medical stuff, RN training is little more than what paramedics go through. It obviously has more useless stuff like how to properly roll a patient when bathing them, and stuff like that, but the true degree of medical knowledge is not that much greater at the RN level. It just isn't. They simply spend more time in clinicals than medics, and that is the real difference. Sure you can teach nurses to think critically, and some work well on air medivac units etc..., but the RN education is not the education to shoot for if you want to improve medic knowledge and training. They are completely different fields of medicine. You could instead dissect out of a PA curriculum the nuts and bolts and have a one year paramedic course that was way more intense and useful than any RN education. The Navy has something similar, called Independent Duty Corpsmen who spend a year becoming a hybrid PA, paramedic to some degree without enough training to be called either, but they are highly useful. They provide completely independent healthcare on subs and small ships where it is not cost effective to send a doctor or PA.
) but you get the point.
