#FOAMed

'Why did you give Mannitol?' asked the Registrar.

This year has been a tough one for the loss of celebrities. We've lost some great people.

After my recent, hugely enjoyable, trip to Austria and attendance at the “notfallmedizin 2016” where, as well as doing a talk about FOAMed, I chaired a session on "Volume and Coagulation" I became aware that the view of our colleagues in mainland Europe about some aspects of resuscitation of traumatically injured patients may differ from ours in the UK.

Good quality, practice-changing prehospital research is difficult to come by for a number of reasons, not least the fact that the standalone specialty itself is in relative infancy. Issues of consent and ethics, combined with the very urgent nature of most of the prehospital care we are interested in undertaking research into, make it very tricky to design and conduct a robust study in the prehospital arena, leaving aside the fact that most of the outcomes of interest occur in hospitals which may be run by entirely different agencies who may (or may not) be cooperative but who will, in any case, need to buy into the aims and methods of the study.

You may have already read this personal account of an Emergency Department interaction by @SLuckettG - if you haven't, I strongly suggest you do so, since its contents have resonated internationally among women working in EM and other specialties. We've spoken before here at St Emlyn's about the challenges of being a woman in EM and both accounts are familiar to me too - I am often described as scary or intimidating.

This post is written by Dr Niall Morris