Led by Dr. Michael Lozano & Bruce Moeller, in partnership with the SNRC, the Florida Center for Emergency Medical Services has redesigned the state's biennial EMT and Paramedic License Renewal Survey, adding a set of validated questions meant to give health officials a clearer, more actionable picture of the EMS workforce. Under a contract with the Department of Health's Bureau of Emergency Medical Oversight, the Center was required to develop and test at least two validated questions across nine topic areas, from basic demographics and recruitment to infectious disease perceptions and the effectiveness of the Center's own training initiatives.
The most significant changes target mental health and wellness. Past versions relied on simple yes/no questions asking providers to attribute symptoms like anxiety or sleep trouble to their jobs, a method that is difficult to score against clinical benchmarks or reliably tracked over time. The new instrument instead draws on established clinical tools, including short screens for depression and anxiety, a single-item burnout measure validated against major research instruments, and items adapted from national health surveillance data. This will also allow Florida's results to be compared against state and national benchmarks. New sections also probe workplace violence, traumatic brain injury history, chronic pain, and whether the workforce is using mental health resources, not just whether their agency offers them.
Beyond individual wellness, the survey investigates systemic workforce issues. Specifically, whether EMS agencies are formally tracking metrics like turnover and vacancy rates, how training programs across the state are performing on measures like NREMT passage rates, graduate employment, and how familiar the workforce is with the Center's own educational resources. Retention questions focus on job satisfaction, and the specific reasons providers say they'd leave, since research has found dissatisfied clinicians are more than eleven times more likely to exit the field than satisfied peers. This redesigned survey, built to allow both agency-level and statewide analysis, is intended to give Florida a data-driven foundation for addressing recruitment and retention challenges that have strained EMS systems nationwide.