Stefan Heße looked back on the development of the rescue vocational school since its inception in 2015: 13 courses have now been successfully completed. Currently, nine more courses are in training. The school thus makes an important contribution to ensuring emergency care in the region. He thanked the course leadership for the approximately 4,000 hours of training behind the graduates and emphasized the diverse deployment opportunities for the new emergency paramedics: from ambulances to emergency physician vehicles to emergency rooms and intensive care units.
"You do important work for and with people. Our healthcare system needs people like you – we need people like you,“ said Stefan Heße, highlighting the high societal significance of the profession, along with a note on the Oberbergischer Kreis's investment efforts in building new rescue stations.
Dr. Ralf Mühlenhaus highlighted the current challenges in emergency services: Over the past ten years, the number of operations in the district has already doubled and is forecasted to increase significantly again over the next ten years. Reasons for this include demographic change and the fact that emergency services are increasingly being used for medical care concerns. At the same time, the Medical Director made it clear that emergency services must take these concerns of the population seriously because they have a guarantor role in medical care. From his own operations, he already knows many of the newly examined emergency paramedics as motivated and committed colleagues and looks forward to working even more closely with them in the future.
School principal Maik Göbel emphasized in his address that emergency services are always a team effort – both during operations and exams. He thanked everyone involved in the training: the trainees themselves, the practice instructors at the rescue stations, colleagues in emergency services, as well as the parents, partners, and friends who were especially crucial during the intensive examination phase. At the same time, he reminded everyone of the great responsibility that emergency paramedics carry in their work for patients.
Course leader Julia Peterek looked back on three varied and busy years and emphasized how proud she was of „her“ course – especially since no one dropped out of the training. She herself and the NOS 04/23 course began their journey on April 1, 2023, at the Academy for Health Economics and Senior Citizens (AGewiS). In her very personal address, she told the graduates: „The streets you travel on become better places because of you. And that's not just a nice sentence – I mean it sincerely.“
The course speakers Benedikt Burkhardt and Maxima Leona Wilken took the celebration as an opportunity to express their gratitude on behalf of the course. In their retrospective, they shared that everyone had not only developed professionally but also personally, and over the past three years, they had grown into a team.
The graduates of the NOS 04/23 course include:
- Helene Bohle
- Jennifer Brungs
- Benedikt Burkhardt
- Lars Doert
- Sophie Köhn
- Antonio Lamarra (Fire Department Lüdenscheid)
- Finn Lorenzen
- Martha Müller
- Gabriel Simon Quack
- Anna-Lena Runkel
- Meike Seimen
- Franziska Josephine Stoffel
- Nils Teckhaus
- Letizia Penelope Weber
- Maxima Leona Wilken.
