IFEM Medical Student Symposium – Team Oceania

May 30, 2022May 26, 2022 ~ iEM Education Project Team ~ Leave a comment

Dear medical students and EM community,

We invite you to the IFEM Medical Student Symposium, the first of its kind, to discuss the present and future of undergraduate emergency medicine education. The IFEM Medical Student Symposium will bring together speakers, facilitators, and attendees from seven regions of Africa, Asia, Central and South America, Europe, the Gulf, North America, and Oceania. You can find more details on the flyer below.

It will take place on June 14th, 2022, at 13:30 AEST (GMT +10). The symposium fee is 10 AUD. Thanks to IFEM leadership and the ICEM organising committee, participants intending to join the Medical Student Symposium only can use this link on the workshop page to register without an additional conference fee.

Please share this blogpost with your colleagues and trainees who might be interested in joining this conversation. We are looking forward to meeting you all virtually at the symposium.

Best regards,
Dr Elif Dilek Cakal & Dr Erin Simon
IFEM Medical Student Symposium Co-leads
IFEM Core Curriculum and Education Committee

IFEM Medical Student Symposium – Team Gulf

May 26, 2022May 13, 2022 ~ iEM Education Project Team ~ Leave a comment

Dear medical students and EM community,

Please share this blogpost with your colleagues and trainees who might be interested in joining this conversation. We are looking forward to meeting you all virtually at the symposium.

Best regards,
Dr Elif Dilek Cakal & Dr Erin Simon
IFEM Medical Student Symposium Co-leads
IFEM Core Curriculum and Education Committee

IFEM Medical Student Symposium – Team North America

May 25, 2022May 17, 2022 ~ iEM Education Project Team ~ Leave a comment

Dear medical students and EM community,

Please share this blogpost with your colleagues and trainees who might be interested in joining this conversation. We are looking forward to meeting you all virtually at the symposium.

Best regards,
Dr Elif Dilek Cakal & Dr Erin Simon
IFEM Medical Student Symposium Co-leads
IFEM Core Curriculum and Education Committee

IFEM Medical Student Symposium – Team Central and South America

May 24, 2022May 13, 2022 ~ iEM Education Project Team ~ Leave a comment

Dear medical students and EM community,

Please share this blogpost with your colleagues and trainees who might be interested in joining this conversation. We are looking forward to meeting you all virtually at the symposium.

Best regards,
Dr Elif Dilek Cakal & Dr Erin Simon
IFEM Medical Student Symposium Co-leads
IFEM Core Curriculum and Education Committee

IFEM Medical Student Symposium – Team Europe

May 19, 2022May 13, 2022 ~ iEM Education Project Team ~ Leave a comment

Dear medical students and EM community,

Please share this blogpost with your colleagues and trainees who might be interested in joining this conversation. We are looking forward to meeting you all virtually at the symposium.

Best regards,
Dr Elif Dilek Cakal & Dr Erin Simon
IFEM Medical Student Symposium Co-leads
IFEM Core Curriculum and Education Committee

IFEM Medical Student Symposium – Team Asia

May 18, 2022May 13, 2022 ~ iEM Education Project Team ~ Leave a comment

Dear medical students and EM community,

Please share this blogpost with your colleagues and trainees who might be interested in joining this conversation. We are looking forward to meeting you all virtually at the symposium.

Best regards,
Dr Elif Dilek Cakal & Dr Erin Simon
IFEM Medical Student Symposium Co-leads
IFEM Core Curriculum and Education Committee

IFEM Medical Student Symposium – Team Africa

May 17, 2022May 13, 2022 ~ iEM Education Project Team ~ Leave a comment

Dear medical students and EM community,

Please share this blogpost with your colleagues and trainees who might be interested in joining this conversation. We are looking forward to meeting you all virtually at the symposium.

Best regards,
Dr Elif Dilek Cakal & Dr Erin Simon
IFEM Medical Student Symposium Co-leads
IFEM Core Curriculum and Education Committee

Basic Emergency Care (BEC): A New Global Health Framework

February 17, 2020February 20, 2020 ~ J. Austin Lee, USA ~ Leave a comment

Experienced emergency medicine providers know the ins and outs of how to approach and assess any patient of any age with a critical illness. As has been discussed previously on this blog, the need to rapidly identify and manage sick and dying patients requires a systematic approach. When a new patient arrives for care, or alternatively when a patient decompensates and gets acutely sicker, the emergency medicine provider is tasked with systematically identifying and treating such conditions.

Because most trauma and critical care approaches and training modules were developed and implemented in high-income, resource-rich contexts, there has long been a need for a systematic approach to critically ill patients in lower-income settings.

Over the past several years, the World Health Organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross/Red Crescent, and the International Federation for Emergency Medicine have been working together to develop and create a training course to aid frontline providers in managing acute illness and acute injury in resource-limited contexts.

Since 2018, the World Health Organization’s Basic Emergency Care course has been developed and refined as a way to teach a systematic, high-yield approach to urgent and emergent health problems. Using both triage and interventional strategies, the course trains participants to be prepared to deal with a variety of critical illnesses, with a focus on trauma, breathing, shock, and altered mental status.

The BEC course is generally given as a 4 to 6-day course to individuals working in healthcare systems around the world. The BEC course is intended for individuals who might be able to or expected to provide emergent patient care, including students, trainees, nurses, physicians, and even pre-hospital or inpatient care providers, among others. This course is not only intended for emergency medicine physicians, but for all types of locally appropriate providers.

The BEC course participants first learn about the ABCDE approach to ill patients, with a recurring emphasis on obtaining a focused patient history using the SAMPLE mnemonic. These skills are crucial and can be applied to almost any patient in any context.

The knowledge gained around ABCDEs and the SAMPLE histories are then applied across the four main care modules in the course, which are: trauma, breathing, shock, and altered mental status. As has been pointed out by others, before any patient goes from alive to dead, they usually pass through the framework of one of these four critical care modules. The hypoglycemic patient develops altered mentation, or the patient with pneumonia develops respiratory distress. As such, lifesaving interventions at these crucial action points can truly save lives.

Each day of the 5-day training course generally has a mix of lectures, group discussions, case scenarios, and hands-on skills stations. The freely available WHO BEC Handbook can help one to better understand the course structure and content.

It should be noted that the BEC course does presume the participant has a very basic but pre-existing knowledge of some of the following: basic human anatomy, basic history taking, basic physical examination skills including vital signs auscultation and abdominal exam, use of a glucometer, and the use of intravenous and intramuscular medications.

In several locations around the world, after the completion of the 5-day course, a Training of the Trainers course has been given, where top course participants and other health system leaders come together to learn how to teach the BEC course. As such, there is a goal for developing and cultivating both local leadership regarding the skills and knowledge around care during critical illness. Subsequently, a locally perpetual training around BEC can take root and become the new standard of emergency care.

Early research by Tenner et al., among others, into the efficacy and impact of the BEC course is showing that indeed, the WHO BEC course is both effective and helpful. For those who are interested in either taking the course, or in becoming a certified trainer, you can contact your national or local emergency medicine leaders and ask for times and locations near you where there may be the opportunity to take this incredibly valuable and impactful course. One such BEC and follow-on training of the trainer course will be taking place in Rwanda in March of 2020; to contribute financially to this Rwandan effort, consider a small donation: here.

References

Tenner AG, Sawe HR, Amato S, et al. Results from a World Health Organization pilot of the Basic Emergency Care Course in Sub Saharan Africa. PLoS One. 2019;14(11):e0224257. Published 2019 Nov 13. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0224257 – pdf link

Cite this article as: J. Austin Lee, USA, "Basic Emergency Care (BEC): A New Global Health Framework," in International Emergency Medicine Education Project, February 17, 2020, https://iem-student.org/2020/02/17/basic-emergency-care/, date accessed: April 25, 2024

ACEM2019 and Incredible India

November 13, 2019November 13, 2019 ~ Arif Alper Cevik ~ Leave a comment

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.

Cite this article as: Arif Alper Cevik, "ACEM2019 and Incredible India," in International Emergency Medicine Education Project, November 13, 2019, https://iem-student.org/2019/11/13/acem2019-and-incredible-india/, date accessed: April 25, 2024