The 10th Asian Conference on Emergency Medicine was successfully completed in New Delhi, India, during the last couple of days. The conference hosted around 1700 attendees around the globe, mainly Asia. There were approximately 300 speakers from all continents. Dr. Tamorish Kole and Dr. Sirinath Kumar were the two Emergency Medicine professionals who behind the success of this conference. Both experts are also a member of the board of directors of the Asian Society for Emergency Medicine (ASEM). At the end of the conference, Dr. Kole took over the presidency from Prof.Dr. Yildiray Cete (Turkey) who served to ASEM for two years.
Vice-President of India, Venkaiah Naidu, opened the conference with promising support to the improvement of Emergency Medicine care in India as well as highlighting the implementation of Emergency Medicine into the undergraduate curriculum. As many countries in Asia, Indian medical graduates are working in acute care settings after graduation. Therefore, focusing on undergraduate education can help many countries in the same context.
This topic one of the items discussed in the ASEM Board of Directors meeting. Creating a widely acceptable undergraduate curriculum is a necessity for Asian countries, especially those in the development stage of Emergency Medicine. ASEM board formed a sub-committee to work on this highly significant problem. Dr. Mohan Tiru (Singapore) and I will be leading board members to continue and finalize the process. Because the International Federation for Emergency Medicine (IFEM) currently working on a comprehensive update process for its’ undergraduate curriculum, there is no need to reinvent the wheel for ASEM. Taking the updated version of the IFEM undergraduate curriculum as the main framework and working on it to create a precise Asian undergraduate curriculum will be enough and probably the fastest way. However, there is a need to understand the current situation and needs in Asian countries. Therefore, the sub-committee of ASEM will work on learning needs assessment and current situation analysis until the IFEM undergraduate curriculum finalized. The expected time for the new updated version of the IFEM undergraduate curriculum is April-May 2020. Completing learning needs assessment and current situation analysis of Asia by March-April 2020 will give the Asian board a chance to move forward with updated IFEM undergraduate curriculum. Probably, developing the Asian curriculum will be possible in a short period of time until the end of 2020.
While ACEM2019 continues, I was able to meet a couple of contributors to the International Emergency Medicine Education Project. I visited Rob Rogers’ well-known course, Medutopia, which aims to increase the quality of the teaching skills of educators. According to Dr. Rogers, this is the most enthusiastic and knowledgable group since the Medutopia journey has begun. Dr. Andy Little and Dr. Mike Giosondi were other two experts who gave the course with Dr. Rogers. You can read and listen to Dr. Rogers’ contributions to the International Emergency Medicine Education Project here.
I also came across to Dr. Simon Carley from Manchester, who is well-known for ST.EMLYN’s blog. He gave a couple of amazing talks during the conference, including one plenary presentation.
One of the surprising things was meeting with one of our blog authors Dr. Kaushila Thilakasiri (Sri Lanka) and her team. This energetic group was not only coming for ASEM to attend meetings, but they also came to compete in SimWars. And of course, they won the first prize.
Two days of workshops and three days of the busy scientific program passed like lightning. In addition to scientific activities, ACEM 2019 team prepared many social events for participants. I think, socially and scientifically, ACEM 2019 was a very busy conference. This created many networking opportunities.
One of the final event was graduation ceremony of 2018-2019 class of Emergency Medicine residents. Around 120 new graduated were appreciated with a nicely setted up ceremony with attendence of leaders of Emergency Medicine such as Prof. Lee Wallis (Past President of IFEM), Dr. Taj Hassan (Pas President of Royal College of Emergency Medicine) and Prof. James Ducharme (President of IFEM) as well as local leaders of Emergency Medicine of India.
As a summary, ACEM2019 was a successful gathering for international Emergency Medicine experts and Asian emergency physicians, residents and medical students.
ACEM 2021 will be in Hong Kong. ASEM board of directors decided to give ACEM2023 to Manila, Phillipines and ACEM2025 to Dubai, United Arab Emirates. We hope to see you all in these upcoming events.