Greater Sydney Area HEMS

Next Wednesday’s Clinical Governance Day will be held at Wollongong as a combined Sydney-Wollongong event.

The theme will be Urban Search & Rescue, with a focus on the medical aspects of USAR missions and the recent deployments in New Zealand and Japan.

We are privileged to have a guest speaker from the United States, Dr David Cone. Dr Cone’s extensive CV includes being Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine and Public Health and EMS Section Chief at Yale University, the editor-in-chief of the journal Academic Emergency Medicine, and being a recent president of the National Association of EMS Physicians. He has served as Medical Team Manager of two urban search and rescue task forces (Pennsylvania and Connecticut). He is also a trained Emergency Medical Technician and firefighter!

Please let Madhura and Mark Newcombe know if you’re planning to attend so we can organise transport and catering.

Hopefully we’ll see you there

Please note that some flexibility is required regarding the handover process, as some trauma centres would prefer handover with the patient still on the stretcher.

This recommendation has come from ITIM‘s Trauma Team Training course.

If you have concerns over the stability of the patient, oxygen supplies etc, then please state your preference to transfer prior to handover – and the reasons why – politely to the team leader. Otherwise kindly comply with the team’s preferred sequence.

Many thanks for your flexibility.

The Clinical Governance Day on Wednesday will include a discussion and critical appraisal of one of the most famous and quoted papers in pre-hospital care – Bickell’s trial of fluids which was a major contributor to the move towards ‘hypotensive resuscitation’. The paper is here – please have a read and a think prior to Wednesday.

Doctors planning on attending the Canyon Training Days in April – don’t forget the list of goodies you need to prepare (bought your Dunlop Volleys from K-Mart yet?) and let Noel know your wetsuit sizes.

The Canyon Training is awesome, and will stretch you mentally and physically. But you should be used to that by now.

Two papers by the team have been published this month:

Prehosp Emerg Care. 2011 Feb 4. [Epub ahead of print]
Logistics and Safety of Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation in Medical Retrieval.
Burns BJ, Habig K, Reid C, Kernick P, Wilkinson C, Tall G, Coombes S, Manning R.

Emerg Med J. 2011 Feb 3. [Epub ahead of print]
Case report: prehospital use of intranasal ketamine for paediatric burn injury.
Reid C, Hatton R, Middleton P.

In addition, Roger Bloomer’s case report of a pre-hospital resuscitative hysterotomy has been accepted by European Journal of Emergency Medicine.

These contributions provide a nice demonstration of the breadth of our practice. In due course I’ll put a page of our publications with links to the full text articles.