{"doi":"10.1001/amajethics.2022.898","title":"How to Better Value EMS Clinicians as Key Care Team Members","abstract":"Emergency medical services (EMS) clinicians, including emergency medical technicians and paramedics, are skilled professionals whose expertise is leveraged routinely to meet a wide range of patient needs.Collaborative interdisciplinary care requires mutual understanding, trust, and respect.Yet, among EMS clinicians and in-and out-of-hospital clinicians, these values are too often not expressed in working relationships.This article offers guidance on how to nourish successful partnerships with EMS clinicians and motivate good care.The American Medical Association designates this journal-based CME activity for a maximum of 1 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit available through the AMA Ed Hub TM .Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity. Undervaluing EMS CliniciansPrehospital professionals-specifically, emergency medical responders (EMR), emergency medical technicians (EMT), and paramedics, presented here in an ascending order of training, experience, and scope of practice-make up the core of emergency medical services (EMS) in the United States.Despite the wide range of vital and highly skilled services that EMS clinicians provide, their contributions are often unknown to, or misunderstood and not acknowledged by, other health care professionals.Even patients often do not understand EMS and its full range of capabilities.This lack of appreciation and awareness adversely affects EMS clinicians, the patients they care for, and the health care system more broadly in terms of missed opportunities to fully leverage EMS clinicians' expertise and increasing rates of burnout within EMS. 1 The resulting departure of EMS clinicians from the workforce and pervasive shortages within EMS can negatively affect community safety and health. 2,3We argue that there are 3 primary drivers of EMS underappreciation and its negative consequences: inadequate understanding of, trust in, and respect for EMS clinicians by other health care professionals and the community at large.Inadequate understanding of and appreciation for the vital role that EMS clinicians play within society is both manifest in, and worsened by, the reliance on volunteer EMS services in many areas of the United States, 4 which suggests that emergency medical care is not a profession but a volunteer activity-and which seems to justify the low wages that professional EMS clinicians are paid. 5These barriers need to be recognized, called out, and addressed if we are to strive for higher quality, more efficient, and more accessible patient-centered care.","journal":"The AMA Journal of Ethic","year":2022,"id":291441,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":3,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9561,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":306790,"name":"Rozalina G. McCoy","orcid":"0000-0002-2289-3183","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":975193,"name":"Andrew J. Torres","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":9,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:30:38.420009Z","pmid":"36170424","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}