For the past four years, Harpswell Neck Fire and Rescue has relied on vital assistance from licensed emergency medical technicians who are students at nearby Bowdoin College.
A total of 20 students from the private Brunswick college have served Harpswell Neck as volunteer EMTs since 2021, with a dozen currently active. They include sophomore Vincent Chen, 20, an aspiring medical professional from the Boston area who has been volunteering since October.
Chen, a neuroscience and economics major, said he learned about the volunteer program in Harpswell through the Bowdoin Emergency Medicine Club. The program, facilitated by the college’s McKeen Center for the Common Good, helps students apply their skills through community engagement.
“I thought this would be a great experience for me to essentially get some clinical exposure while I try to figure out my potential career aspirations,” Chen said in an interview.
Harpswell Neck fire officials stressed that all of the student volunteers are trained and licensed. “They’re fully capable EMTs — it’s not a club,” said volunteer EMT instructor Scott Cammarn.
In early March, the student EMTs put their skills to the test during a training exercise at the Harpswell Neck fire station, practicing cardiopulmonary resuscitation and other lifesaving skills. They included Bowdoin freshman Edward Fontaine, 23, who previously served four years in the U.S. Navy as a military police officer.
Fontaine, a California native from San Jose, received his EMT certification in the Navy. He is also pursuing a career in medicine and said volunteering in Harpswell has helped him gain hands-on experience.
“I think this is a great opportunity for anyone in premed, or who wants experience as a first responder or in a medical setting,” Fontaine said. “If (you) want experience, get your EMT cert, get your license, then go out and volunteer.”
Harvey Pough, the Harpswell Neck department’s rescue chief, said the student volunteers get a lot out of the program, and most of them stick with it until they graduate.
“What we do … is stand back and let them provide the primary patient care, as long as it’s something within their scope, so that they’re getting the experience,” Pough said in an interview. “It’s a chance to go from the book learning they had in their EMT courses and apply that in the field, which is a very different sort of situation.”
Most of the student volunteers work their shifts alongside a more senior EMT, he said. However, a few have proven themselves capable of handling shifts on their own, which lessens the burden on other volunteers.
So far, the Bowdoin students have only been volunteering with one of Harpswell’s three independent fire departments, Pough said. Still, there has been some talk of the Orr’s and Bailey Islands Fire Department taking on some students in the future.
If Harpswell voters approve the construction of a centrally located municipal fire and rescue station in June, Pough said, it’s possible the student EMTs could eventually work out of that location as well.
“From the students’ point of view, it would probably make more sense for them to hang out at the central station and respond with a paramedic, because they would get more frequent calls that way,” Pough said.
Chen said he has only gone out on two calls so far. One was a nonemergency call in which he was able to take the patient’s vitals and assess whether they needed medical care. The other was to help lift a patient who had fallen, after which Chen performed a similar assessment.
“We do a kind of risk assessment of the situation to determine if there are any potential implications for what might have caused the patient to fall,” he said, “or if the patient might require additional assistance in the future based on their health background, anything we observed when we were on scene, and the patient’s own self-assessment.”
