‘9-1-1. What is your emergency?’
In 2024, 68% of Homewood Fire Department’s calls were for medical emergencies. In 2024, it was 64.5% in Flossmoor. Riding in those ambulances are firefighter/paramedics and emergency medical technicians (EMTs).
Training for those emergency specialists is being handled by Prairies State College, taking a lead role in conjunction with UChicago Medicine/Ingalls Hospital. PSC is providing certified classes that can help the future EMTs and paramedics pass the national exams necessary for employment.
Through cooperative agreements the programs reach outside of the PSC boundaries extending east to the Illinois/Indiana border, west into Frankfort and New Lenox, north to Homewood and south down to Beecher, said Chad Vlietstra, PSC fire science program coordinator.
The EMT Training Regimen
Today PSC is offering its 155th EMT class. The program originated in the old St. James Hospital in Chicago Heights and was there for many years until it relocated in about 1998 into PSC’s health tech wing just north of the main campus in Chicago Heights.
Today classes meet in a former office building off of Cicero Avenue in Matteson that’s been fitted with a SIM ambulance so students get a feel for what they will need to do when transporting a patient.
Several rooms in the building are being converted to simulate a house to help train EMTs on how to help a patient on-sight and learn how to correctly transport them from a room and through a hallway. “It’s really a great facility for us,” Vlietstra said.
In the fall semester, PSC enrolled 69 students in EMT classes. Students met twice a week over four months in either morning or evening sessions. Students do classroom work and then practicums that are in conjunction with local fire departments and Franciscan Health in Olympia Fields.
Vlietstra said 20 women are in the program, and this class had two students who just recently graduated from high school.
“I would say that’s nothing out of the norm for us,” he said, noting that students come from all walks of life looking for a career.
Nick Biasella has been the EMT lead instructor for PSC the past 30 years and has been an EMT and paramedic the past 46 years. He worked paid-on-call for South Chicago Heights Fire Department and neighboring communities.
To complete the EMT class, Vlietstra said the student must complete a minimum of 13 competencies. To graduate students have to meet a 24-hour minimum requirement in both clinical time at Franciscan Health and through riding time with a fire department or ambulance service. They also must pass the National Registry of EMTs cognitive exam for certification and licensure. Topics include anatomy/physicology, dealing with different patient scenarios and cardiac and spinal cord injuries.
Some students come with a plan to work with a specific fire department, but Vlietstra said that isn’t necessary. PSC partners with agencies and can get students the drive time they need.
Biasella said EMTs “now are doing 10 times more than when I was an EMT” in part due to technological improvements and an ability to provide certain medications per a doctor’s order. Biasella remembers that “in my day, we just gave them oxygen.”
The need for EMTs is growing. Biasella said, “There isn’t an ambulance service out there that can’t use 10, 15 EMTs.” There’s been steady growth in PSC’s EMT enrollment.
The instructor said he reminds EMT students it takes a certain kind of person willing to help make a situation better. “It’s not a job, it a passion.”
Paramedic training moves to PSC
Locally, the first paramedic class was offered in 1985 at Ingalls Memorial Hospital. Dr. Bernard Heilicser, an emergency room physician from Flossmoor, served as the emergency medical system director of the South Cook County EMS system. The program trained hundreds of paramedics.
Prairie State College graduated its first paramedic class in 2024. Vlietstra said it’s a “very intense” 11-month program with clinical and ride time mandates. Out of 30 students enrolled, 29 completed the program. The current class has 36 students.
Instructor Margaret “Meg” Murphy was a lecturer in the paramedic program at UChicago Medicine/Ingalls Hospital before joining PSC’s staff. She brings 30 years experience as a Chicago Fire Department paramedic.
“All the people who taught me had tremendous heart and I hope to bring that to what I give to these students,” Murphy said.
She believes “a good paramedic makes a great EMT or a great EMT makes a good paramedic. We all have that same foundation. Paramedic brings you into advanced life support using a cardiac defibrulator, cardiac medications, starting IVs and intubating patients. Those are skills that graduate from the EMT level.”
Murphy and other PSC instructors, including Andrew Sline, a paramedic with the Homewood Fire Department, are training students to pass a national registry exam.
Murphy said after passing the exam a paramedic can work across the country and some international countries. There’s also a skills tracking system that can tell future employers the paramedic’s fundamental knowledge.
Related story:
- Next Gen: Homewood, Flossmoor staff are EMTs paramedics (Jan. 1, 2026).
