Mr Ndotenda Ravhandalala

Lebone College of Emergency Care (LCOEC) is a Gauteng Provincial Department of Health training College under the Directorate of the Gauteng Emergency Medical Services (EMS). LCOEC is where Gauteng EMS operational staff, and community are transformed and developed in order to meet the health needs of the Gauteng Province. The College was established in the 1980’s as the Transvaal Provincial Administration Ambulance College offering in-service and vocational specific educational courses at the Pretoria and Gauteng Colleges. After 1994, and with the reconceptualization of Emergency Medical Services and Training the two Colleges merged to form one and the College was renamed the Gauteng Ambulance Training College (GATC), still offering vocational courses. With further developments in EMS Training and Education, in 2000 the GATC was renamed LCOEC as we know it today.

EMS qualifications were introduced in South Africa in the form of short courses namely, Basic Life Support (BLS), Intermediate Life Support’ (ILS) and Critical Care Assistant (CCA). LCOEC offered those programmes up until the then Minister of Health Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, in terms of section 24 of the Health Professions Act, 1974 (Act No. 56 of 1974), signed the regulation which provide for the closure of the short course qualification registers.

Revised and new qualifications were now to be aligned to the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) and the National Qualification Framework (NQF), as outlined, and described in the National Emergency Care Education and Training (NECET) Policy.

Taking the above into account it become necessary for LCOEC to create an enabling environment that will facilitate the migration of existing Gauteng EMS staff from the old qualification (short course) system towards the new three-tiered system. As the interim solution LCOEC entered a partnership with Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University (SMU) through Service Level Agreement (SLA), which is aimed at creating platform to produce an emergency care provider.

The two previous years has been challenging for education and training due to COVID 19 which then saw the adoption of the hybrid teaching and learning model in which it’s a combination of face-to-face and virtual (or online) learning.  With this kind of teaching the College envisaged to produce emergency care personnel that are technologically inclined and literate in order to respond to a rapidly changing environment.

As the Principal of LCOEC, my vision is to ‘create an institution of academic excellence in research and Higher Education Training of Pre-hospital personnel’ which is aligned with the institution vision.

The college operates within a national landscape where access to higher education have been proven to be a challenging. The College in partnership with SMU has implemented the Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) policy in both the Diploma and Higher Certificate programmes.

In August 2021 the minister of Health and Minister of Higher education entered into an agreement that will allow Emergency Medical Services training colleges to offer NQF aligned programmes. The college is currently working to acquire accreditation from the Council of Higher Education (CHE). Since qualifications like these are reserved as scarce skills in many parts of the world, both qualifications will have opportunity for employment within EMS and related industries.