Abigail Hebert

The Bowdoin Emergency Medicine Club (BEMC), a McKeen Center for the Common Good on campus volunteer group, works to educate the campus about emergency medicine and connect students with community volunteer opportunities. The club is also working to create a student emergency medical services (EMS) system on campus.

BEMC currently holds meetings where the group goes over different areas of emergency medicine, as well as various training sessions for the campus community. The club also sends students with emergency medical technician (EMT) certifications to volunteer shifts at two locations in the Bowdoin area—Harpswell Neck Fire and Rescue and Orr’s and Bailey Island Fire and Rescue.

Since its inception five years ago, the BEMC has been trying to establish a student EMS on campus. BEMC President Emmy Wheatley ’26 discussed the ultimate goal of this initiative.

“The goal is to have student EMTs who are able to respond to on-campus medical emergencies,” Wheatley said. “That group would volunteer and be able to provide free and fast emergency health care to anybody on campus.”

Wheatley discussed how this program would increase student health and safety.

“We have been working towards this ultimate goal, because obviously, the financial burdens of needing to make an emergency call to healthcare services is one that impairs a lot of people from actually making that decision,” Wheatley said. “To improve health safety on this campus, that’s been a huge goal of ours, as well as promoting greater comfort in calling services. Having student EMTs, we feel, would make some people feel … less threatened, in a way, by inherent power dynamics that exist when you call law enforcement, … [or] Security.”

Though BEMC has run into some issues with moving the program forward, Wheatley believes the outlook for student EMS is promising.

“Of course, once it really becomes a reality, we really need to iron out all the details, and so that’s something that we’ve been working on,” Wheatley said. “But we have our people, we have the resources that we need and we have the go ahead from the administration to start building this.”

Wheatley also discussed how the launch of the program will require outreach so that the campus community is aware of how a student EMS system would work.

“It’s also super important that the community become aware of what we’re doing, and so we’re planning a few events to inform the community of the work that we’re going to be doing,” Wheatley said. “We’ll have Q&A sessions. Like [for example], confidentiality might be an issue for some people. [It] shouldn’t be because we’re medical professionals, and we’re trained in that.”

Bowdoin’s student EMS would follow the lead of other peer institutions. Alex Bloom ’26, BEMC’s leader of on-campus engagement, discussed how many other NESCAC schools have similar programs.

“Middlebury has a big program, [as do] Bates and Colby. So, first of all, clearly it works, and it’s a really good thing,” Bloom said. “It’s a lower call volume in Harpswell, so we don’t always get as much experience. And so we’d get more experience and practice on campus.”

Bloom discussed how he sees Bowdoin’s EMT-trained students as being very capable of working in a future on-campus EMS system.

“As students, we know what’s going on at Bowdoin,” Bloom said. “I think from our training and what we know on the ambulance and the way we know the student body and how Bowdoin operates, I think we’re very well prepared to take over.”

Even as BEMC focuses on creating a campus EMS, the club doesn’t want to leave its community partners in Harpswell behind. This could include requiring students to volunteer with local EMS programs before they are certified to operate on campus.

“Something that is super important to me is that I don’t want establishing an on-campus EMS to mean that we no longer interact with our community partners, because they are truly what have helped to grow our club to what it is right now,” Wheatley said.

Though he’ll have graduated from Bowdoin before the student EMS likely is established, Bloom expressed hope and excitement for its future.

“I’m really excited to see how it turns out,” Bloom said. “I’m definitely going to keep in touch and see how things are because I think it’s gonna be really, really cool.”