Around 600 people received potentially life-saving treatment, including drugs to treat heart attacks, during a pilot programme to train the State's first 29 advanced paramedics.
The newly qualified paramedics graduated from UCD yesterday with higher diplomas in advanced emergency medical technology.
Prof Gerard Bury of the department of general practice at UCD, which grants the academic award, said he was "delighted" with how the programme had operated.
He said that during an internship programme run in conjunction with Dublin Fire Brigade and the HSE Eastern Region ambulance service between September and December last year, 1,200 patients were treated by the advanced paramedics. "Of those, an advanced intervention was performed in 600 cases."
Such intervention might include the administration of drugs such as adrenaline to treat cardiac arrest, or the use of advanced airways techniques to help a patient to breathe, he said.
All treatment was carried out under medical guidance or parameters established by doctors.
The law was amended recently to allow emergency medical technicians and advanced paramedics administer a range of drugs in certain cases.
Prof Bury said it was not possible to say how many of the patients would be alive or dead as a result of receiving the advanced treatment. "But none of those procedures would have been available to those patients before this programme."
He said the advanced paramedics had not been able to put their skills into operation on a full-time basis since the end of the internship last year because there were issues involved in fully implementing the programme.
However, a HSE spokeswoman denied there was any issue with the implementation and said the scheme would be rolled out in a matter of "days or weeks".