Lots of our emergency care colleagues will be involved or interested in global health, whether that is in an area of access, resource and/or context-limited healthcare. Over the past few years there have been initiatives such as Global Emergency Care Collaborative or GECCo which has been working to bring such like-minded colleagues together. Meanwhile, some collaborative working between members of GECCo and the RCEM Global Emergency Medicine committee (there’s a fair bit of cross-pollination which is useful for battling siloes!) allowed for some further understanding of UK engagement in global health by emergency care practitioners, adding to some prior work within RCEM members and fellows.
How the map works
The culmination of this work, which my colleague Claire Crichton-Iannone and I have, at times, dragged kicking and screaming into existence, is an interactive map of global health engagement hosted on the RCEM website. The hope is that it encourages better collaboration and more sustainable working in global health whilst creating networks and mentorship opportunities.
The map can be used to find and/or share information. Each UK map pin is a base location of an emergency care colleague who shared one or more global health engagements. The map pins elsewhere in the world relate to the location of those engagements. The central email address will be used to facilitate connection with colleagues. Alongside this, we hope that more and more colleagues can share their own global health work and add another few pins to the map.
It isn’t the slickest of set-ups but results can be filtered by type of work entailed e.g. research/clinical/policy or whether it is an RCEM project/programme. Medical-student potential has been marked with an asterisk. As a team (of volunteers) we’ll be trying to turn requests around within a week but bear with us in the early days as we find our feet.
The future… and you!
There are undoubtedly better version of this – especially those versions on an endless budget. However if you spot something which you think could work better and have the time, expertise and interest to help us make it work, please get in touch, Obviously if you have a secret link to an endless budget, we’ll consider that too!!
To find out more: [email protected]
