Romanian paramedics team named best in the world

A team of Romanian paramedics won first place at the World Rescue Challenge 2025, a competition that sees first responders and trauma teams from around the world develop new skills and share knowledge.

This year, the competition took place in Karlovac, Croatia, and was attended by two Romanian paramedics from Bucharest who have been working together for 17 years.

The event featured a trauma challenge and an extrication challenge. Teams were assessed on their “lifesaving” capabilities during trauma-based scenarios.

According to the organizers, the first “high-intensity challenge provided an immersive environment where rescue professionals could develop, test, and refine their trauma management techniques in realistic, high-pressure scenarios with live casualties.”

Similarly, the extrication challenge allowed teams to measure their leadership, technical ability, communication, and medical skills in dealing with an incident and getting the casualty to a place of safety.

“Our colleagues return home with four awards: first place in the ‘trauma overall’ event, first place together with the representative team of Portugal in the newly introduced team event, ‘trauma triage scenario,’ second place in the ‘trauma complex scenario’ event, and second place in the 'trauma standard scenario’ event. This is the fourth consecutive year that Romania has occupied a place on the podium of the World Rescue Challenge,” representatives of ISU Bucharest-Ilfov said on Facebook.

“The surprise of the event itself was that we had to collaborate with another team from another country, and this year we made a good team with those from Portugal, who have a style similar to ours, and we complemented each other very well,” said Lucian Tătaru, SMURD paramedic, cited by Digi24.

“For us, it wasn’t something new. Even during interventions, when we are on duty, we have encountered such situations and we managed brilliantly every time,” added Valentin Cimpoeru, SMURD paramedic.

Before the competition, the two paramedics go through months of training. Ionuț Ioțe, the trainer of the two, says they use tools to improvise scenarios that are as close to reality as possible.

(Photo source: World Rescue Challenge on Facebook)