Veterans hit the road as paramedics
Let’s play a game of Guess the Job. The career in question suits those with a strong sense of civic duty. It’s a job that involves focused training in preparation for challenging and unpredictable conditions, with a high-adrenaline factor that requires an ability to remain calm in stressful situations. People in this line of work wear a uniform that is instantly recognisable, and which the wearer can be proud of.
Of course, there might be several jobs that carry at least some of the above characteristics – but two careers that definitely tick all the boxes are ‘military personnel’ and ‘paramedic’.
In the past two years, ACU has seen a 10-fold rise in student enrolments from former members of the Australian Defence Force (ADF). Remarkably, around one in four of those students are studying paramedicine, making it a popular course choice for former military personnel.
The trend has not gone unnoticed among the growing legion of student veterans at ACU.
“It’s a very common topic of discussion on campus,” says Stephen Powter, an army veteran and final-year paramedicine student at ACU’s Brisbane Campus.
“I think everyone’s initially surprised when they get to university and so many paramedicine students are veterans, but when you think about it, it does make a lot of sense.”
Just like soldiers in combat, paramedics occasionally find themselves in volatile situations that are fast-moving and variable. While many of us would waver in these critical scenarios, paramedics are trained to stay calm and focused so they can deal with whatever is in front of them.
“Paramedicine does align very closely with what is common for people in the military, in that you go through a process of intensive training that prepares for a work profile that doesn’t have a lot of certainty in it,” says former Army Colonel Andrew Condon, ACU’s Industry Professor for Veterans and Their Families.
“So you spend a lot of time training, preparing and practicing for the worst-case scenario – in the military, that might be conflict or a natural disaster; in paramedicine, it might be a serious accident or a mass casualty incident – and in both cases, that might not happen very often, but you train just in case, and when the time comes to do your job, you’re prepared to do it as best as possible.”
Thanks partly to these similarities, paramedicine is proving to be an attractive option for many veterans looking to transition to a new career.
“I think the synergies are pretty clear,” says Stephen Powter, “because we do all this training and practice and theory, and the idea is that it prepares us for these situations, which of course it does, but even so, every time I’ve been on a paramedicine placement, it’s been like, ‘Woah, what’s going on out here!’ I had similar experiences in the army, and I think that unpredictability holds an attraction to many veterans.”
Stephen joined the military in 2014 and served as an artillery observer based in Darwin until he left the service in 2019. He found the transition to civilian life challenging, as do many veterans.
“I knew it was going to be hard but I was surprised at how challenging it was – it took at least a year to let go of the ‘green’ and settle into a new direction and focus.”
In 2020, he enrolled in a Bachelor of Paramedicine at ACU, identifying it as the profession that most matched his skills and interests.
“I knew I wanted to do something in healthcare, to help people and to be challenged, and I guess the thing that brought me into paramedicine was that little bit of an adrenaline rush it has,” Stephen says.
“I was seeking something similar to the army, where you sometimes find yourself in these wild situations that you don’t get in many other jobs, but I was seeking it totally unconsciously. It was only when I got here [to university] that I realised why and how I arrived at paramedicine.”
Other ACU paramedicine students have cited a sense of purpose and a desire to help people as things that drew them to their new career.
Take Joel Hartgrove, who enrolled in a Bachelor of Paramedicine in 2021 after he was medically discharged from the army with a chronic injury. After completing his first placement as part of his ACU course, Joel discovered a love for the team-based ethos of the ambulance service – something he missed after leaving the ADF.
“There’s also a sense of pride in doing something to help people,” he says. “I had a lot of pride every day when I would put on the Australian Army uniform, and for me, it would be the same feeling, putting on the paramedic uniform and doing something useful and important.”
The talk of pride and belonging is familiar to Industry Professor Andrew Condon. Since joining ACU in early 2022, he has had conversations with many student veterans who’ve discovered a renewed sense of purpose in their pathway.
