Is the Medical Care Provider a prerequisite to Medical PIC? Is Medical First Aid Provider the same as Medical Care Provider?
The USCG does not require a prerequisite, but some of the schools do. If there is no prerequisite the PIC course will be about three days longer.
So I have Medical First Aid Provider, does that count as a prerequisite, or is it an arbitrary prerequisite from the school?
As Tugsailor said, the Coast Guard doesn’t require a prerequisite. But, some schools have structured their courses in away that omits the refresher of basic material covered in the provider course, the PIC course with the prerequisite is usally 2 or 3 days shorter than the “full” PIC course. For those, the Coast Guard has allowed the prerequiste format but has set a time limit on how long after the provider course the PIC course must be taken. This limit is usually 6 months and in no case that I am aware of is it more than a year. And, because every school structires their courses differently, the prerequiste is not to hold the provider endorsement, or to have taken any provider course, it usually means you must have taken the provider course at the the same school where you will take the PIC course. This essentially means that if you have already taken a provider course, you need to take a full PIC course without a prerequiste requirement.
See above. it won’t count as the prerequiste unless: 1) the school is approved to give PIC in this format, and 2) you took the provider course at the same school, and 3) you took provider no more than a year ago.
Might be a dumb question, but where is all that information about timing, recency, etc?
It’s in the specific approval given to each course. The NMC has a not at all user friendly 1,000 page or so list of courses on their web page that includes the approval. Probably easier if you already know what schools have the courses, ask the school for a copy of the current “approval letter” (not the certificate) from the NMC.
The Medicare Provider Course is only a three day superficial first aid course with a little bit, very little, extra thrown in.
The high profit course I took at a money grubbing shit school did not even provide a book. I followed along in my own Wilderness First Aid (2 day course ) book. The content was almost identical.
Don’t screw around, go take the best quality, longest, and most expensive Med-PIC course that you can find. Get the course book well ahead of time and Pre-study.
At one time, NMC had a nice drop down menu that filtered all the courses by name. It was fairly convenient but it disappeared (or is hidden on the NMC site to the point I can’t find it).
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They replaced it with 800 pages. You can do a word search, but it’s not as good as it use to be.
One would think that indexing by course and providing a list of schools approved fo provide that course would be fundamental, but not to the coalminer’s daughters at NMC.
I’ve used that list, reminds me of a paper phone book. I searched for a class, found the website for the school, and didn’t go any further down the list after I found one that offered the course at a reasonable price and could be done online.
Should start A1 Academy, Maritime…
And in the now somewhat distant past, they had separate pdf lists for each of the most common types of courses. The drop down search had to go when NMC was forced to chnage their web page to conform to DoD protocols a few years ago.
Not really. It’s only like that if you use a phone book to find everyone who lives on a certain street,