Some conferences leave you with a list of clinical updates. Others leave you with new questions. A few make you think again about how we learn, how we teach, and what it means to practise Emergency Medicine together. IncrEMentuM 2026 in Murcia was one of those events.
For those who have not been, IncrEMentuM is not an easy conference to describe in a single sentence. It is an Emergency Medicine event built around short clinical talks, live simulation, hosted expert conversations, carefully produced video, music, humour and moments of deliberate emotional weight. The 2026 event brought clinicians from at least 49 countries and territories to Murcia, with the programme delivered in English and supported by simultaneous translation for the large Spanish-speaking audience.
I should start with a caveat. I was not a detached observer. I was involved in hosting the event, and I had hosted the previous edition too. That makes this less a detached conference review than a reflection from close to the stage. But hosting an event is not the same as creating it. The design, production, talks, simulations, videos, music, translation, logistics and technical delivery were the work of other people: the organisers, faculty, simulation teams, production crew, translators, technicians, volunteers and venue staff who made the event happen. My role was visible, but visibility should not be confused with ownership. At most, hosting gave me a particular view of the work that others had done.
That closeness brings limitations. When you are part of something, you see some things clearly and miss others. You also have to be careful not to confuse effort with impact, or enthusiasm with educational value. The real test of a conference is not how it feels while it is happening, but what people remember, discuss, adapt and use afterwards. Still, being close to the event did offer one useful perspective. It made it possible to see the shape of the programme: the rhythm, the transitions, the way sessions interacted, and the way the audience responded.
What stood out in Murcia was not simply the scale or the production, although both were impressive. It was the attempt to make Emergency Medicine education feel more like Emergency Medicine itself: fast, uncertain, collaborative, sometimes uncomfortable, often energising, and always dependent on the people in the room. There are not many Emergency Medicine conferences that would start with a live performance of Defying Gravity, but IncrEMentuM set out its stall early. This was not going to be a conventional conference. It was going to have pace, theatre, risk and energy — and the audience was invited along for the ride.
Emergency Medicine education beyond the lecture
A conference can easily become a timetable. Speaker follows speaker. Session follows session. The coffee breaks are pleasant, the slides are good, and everyone goes home with a few new ideas. There is nothing wrong with that. A well-delivered lecture remains one of the great tools of medical education. A good talk can clarify a difficult subject, challenge assumptions, summarise evidence and change practice. But Emergency Medicine is not a specialty of isolated facts. It is a specialty of integration.
Knowing the evidence matters, but so does knowing when it applies. Knowing the guideline matters, but so does communicating it under pressure. Knowing the plan matters, but so does adapting when the patient, the team, the department or the system does something unexpected. Those things are harder to teach through lectures alone.
At IncrEMentuM, the individual sessions mattered, but the event was clearly aiming for something broader. The educational value was not always contained within a single talk. It often emerged through the sequence: a focused presentation, a simulation, a hosted conversation on the Friends-style set, and then the conversations that continued outside the auditorium. The format did not rely on open audience Q&A to create dialogue. Instead, it created a rhythm in which ideas were introduced, tested, reframed and then carried into the spaces between sessions. The learning was in the connections.
That is difficult to design and easy to overclaim. Not every moment will land for every person. No conference can meet every educational need. But the ambition was noticeable: to create a space where clinical knowledge, decision-making, human factors, performance and reflection could sit together.
That feels right for Emergency Medicine.
Fewer speakers, more familiarity
One of the subtler design choices at IncrEMentuM was the size of the speaker group. Many conferences use a large faculty, with lots of speakers each delivering one talk before disappearing back into the audience, the airport or the conference dinner. There is nothing wrong with that model. It brings breadth, variety and a lot of expertise into the programme. But it also means that the audience is constantly starting again. A new speaker arrives, the room recalibrates, the tone shifts, and everyone takes a few minutes to work out who this person is, how they teach, and whether they are going to take the session somewhere useful.
IncrEMentuM felt different – There were 17 speakers, but they appeared across multiple parts of the event: talks, simulations, hosted conversations and discussions around the programme. That repeated exposure changed the relationship between the audience and the faculty. Over time, people became familiar. You started to recognise a speaker’s style, their humour, their clinical interests, their way of explaining uncertainty. That matters more than we sometimes acknowledge.
There is a kind of relaxation that comes when the audience thinks, “I’ve seen her before. I know her style. I know this is going to be good.” It reduces the work of orientating to someone new and allows people to settle into the learning more quickly. Trust builds incrementally. A speaker is no longer just a name in the programme; they become part of the rhythm of the event. That repeated exposure also added authenticity. You might hear someone speak about a topic early in the day, and later see them involved in a simulation, a hosted conversation or a practical demonstration. Ideas did not appear once and vanish; they returned, were reframed, and were tested in different formats. The faculty were not just talking about the work. They were prepared to show how they thought, acted and adapted in front of the room.
“I’ve seen her before. I know her style. I know this is going to be good.”
There is a risk, of course. A smaller speaker group can narrow the range of voices if it is not chosen carefully. But at IncrEMentuM the international mix, the range of clinical backgrounds and the variety of formats helped avoid that. The smaller faculty did not make the event feel smaller. It made it feel more coherent.
The audience was not being asked to repeatedly reset. It was being invited into a developing conversation.
Simulation, uncertainty and decision-making under pressure
One of the defining features of IncrEMentuM is the use of live simulation and performance-based education. Simulation in front of a large audience is risky. It can become too theatrical, oversimplify clinical work, or turn into spectacle rather than education. But when it works, it does something that slides cannot. It changes the emotional temperature of the room.
A slide can describe cognitive load. A graph can show deterioration. A speaker can explain fixation error, airway planning, role allocation or team communication. But a simulation allows the audience to feel a version of the pressure. People lean forward. They anticipate. They disagree quietly. They recognise behaviours they have seen in themselves and others.
The value of simulation is not that it is real. Everyone knows it is not. The value is that it can reveal things that are real: uncertainty, hesitation, leadership, communication, prioritisation, overload, recovery and the small decisions that shape patient care.
Whether it was the moment the simulated patient was pulled from beneath the car, the baby born despite the complications, or the collective uncertainty about whether the local anaesthetic had been effective enough to allow laryngoscopy during an awake intubation demonstration, the audience seemed to hold its breath.
What was striking was the generosity in the room. People were not watching for failure. They were willing the teams on. When the demonstrations worked, the success felt shared and collegiate rather than distant or performative.
That generosity was not accidental. It reflected the atmosphere created by the organisers, faculty and simulation teams. The room felt demanding, but supportive. It allowed people to take visible educational risks without making the point of the exercise public embarrassment.
Hosted Q&A and the Friends-style set
The same was true of the question-and-answer sessions. These were not delivered from lecterns or arranged as formal panels behind a table. They took place on a deliberately informal Friends-style set, with speakers brought into a space that looked and felt more like a conversation than an interrogation.
From the host’s chair, it was clear that the environment changed the tone. The value of those sessions came from the speakers’ willingness to think aloud and from the environment the organisers had created around them.
It would be easy to dismiss that sort of staging as a gimmick. I do not think it was. The set softened the hierarchy between speaker and audience and made the discussion feel more human. After the intensity of a talk or simulation, it created a conversational space in which ideas could be tested, clarified and gently challenged.
Hosted Q&A can make uncertainty visible. It is where the polished certainty of the presentation can be opened up a little. It is where a speaker can say, “Actually, this is difficult,” or “In our system we do it this way, but that may not work everywhere.” It is also where the audience can watch experts think aloud, rather than only hear their conclusions.
The Friends-style set made those moments feel less like a performance of expertise and more like a conversation between colleagues.
It also removed one of the familiar jeopardies of conference Q&A: the roaming microphone, the not-quite-question, and the collective squirm while everyone waits to see where the intervention is going. IncrEMentuM avoided that. The audience could relax and listen, while the hosted conversations still allowed uncertainty, challenge and nuance to surface.
Introductory videos, music and the heartbeat motif
The introductory videos before each talk were another example of that same care. They were not just filler while the next speaker walked to the stage. Each one seemed deliberately constructed: carefully chosen music, well-selected quotations, visual humour, and occasionally scenes that were unexpectedly moving or even heartbreaking. Those videos changed the way talks began. They gave each speaker an emotional and intellectual frame before a word had been spoken. Sometimes they lifted the room. Sometimes they made people laugh. Sometimes they quietened everyone down. They created a shared moment of attention before the teaching started, which is a small thing only if it is done badly.
The recurring heartbeat motif was particularly effective. It gave the event a constant pulse, running underneath the clinical content, the simulation, the conversations and the movement between sessions. In an Emergency Medicine conference, that image did not need much explanation. It reminded us, gently but repeatedly, that beneath all the education, debate, performance and technology, there is always a patient, a team, and a pulse. That could easily have been overdone. It was not. It became part of the rhythm of the event.
Again, that was not incidental. It was production work, editorial work and creative work. The videos, music and transitions showed how much thought had gone into the moments before the formal teaching began. They helped the speakers land well, but they were not the speakers’ work alone. They were part of the architecture built around them.
Why attention matters in medical education
All of this took attention seriously. Medical conferences sometimes treat attention as though it is guaranteed. It is not. Attention has to be earned, protected and renewed, especially now that so much educational content can be accessed anywhere. The staging, timing, music, lighting, humour, introductory videos and pace at IncrEMentuM were not decorative extras. They were part of the educational environment. That does not mean style matters more than substance. It means style can help substance land.
The point here is not that every conference needs a stage set, live performance or carefully edited video. It is that attention is part of learning. At IncrEMentuM, the organisers and production team seemed to understand that the way an audience arrives at a teaching moment can influence what it is able to take from it.
One of the important things to understand about IncrEMentuM is that it was not built under the umbrella of a College, a large institution or an established professional machine. It was organised by a group of passionate and committed Spanish Emergency Physicians who chose to create something different. That matters.
An independent Emergency Medicine conference with room to be disruptive
But independence can also create freedom. Without needing to fit a traditional institutional template, IncrEMentuM was able to take creative risks: short talks, live simulation, performance, informal hosted conversations, introductory videos, translation, and emotional as well as cognitive engagement.
Independence should not be romanticised too easily. Running an event like this without institutional backing carries financial, reputational and personal risk. The margins for error are smaller, and the people behind it carry a burden that may not be obvious to delegates sitting in the auditorium.
That does not make the event perfect, or mean every choice will work for every delegate. But it does make the achievement more interesting. IncrEMentuM was not simply a conference delivered to Emergency Physicians. It was a conference created by Emergency Physicians willing to take some risks on behalf of the specialty.
A global Emergency Medicine audience
The breadth of the audience added another layer.
Delegates came from at least 49 countries and territories. The list I have includes Aruba, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Botswana, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jersey, Lithuania, Malta, Mexico, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States. I suspect even that list may miss a few.
The event itself was delivered in English, which made sense for an international faculty and audience, but that could easily have created a problem. In Spain, with a large contingent of Spanish-speaking delegates from Spain and Latin America, an English-only event might have unintentionally made some of the people closest to the event feel more distant from it.
The simultaneous translation helped prevent that. It was not just a technical extra. It was an important part of the event’s accessibility and hospitality. It allowed IncrEMentuM to function as an international conference without asking Spanish-speaking delegates to be passive observers in their own linguistic space. That felt especially important given that the event was organised by Spanish Emergency Physicians, hosted in a Spanish city, and attended by so many Spanish-speaking clinicians.
How do you do this where you work?
Translation is sometimes treated as a logistical detail, but here it felt like part of the educational design. It made the room larger without making it less connected. It allowed the event to be delivered in a common international language while still recognising the people, place and professional community that had made it possible.
Emergency Medicine is delivered locally, but many of its challenges are shared. The systems differ, the resources differ, the training structures differ, and the pressures are not identical. But there are familiar themes everywhere: crowding, uncertainty, risk, resuscitation, communication, leadership, fatigue, training, and the need to make decisions with incomplete information.
In a room with clinicians from so many places, a discussion about airway management is not only about one system’s practice. A conversation about flow is not only about one country’s pressures. A simulation about decision-making under stress is recognisable to people working in very different settings.
That does not mean the differences disappear. They should not. The differences are often where the learning is. A perspective from someone in a different system can expose an assumption. A conversation with someone working in a different clinical culture can make familiar problems look different.
Some of the most useful learning happens outside the formal programme: in the coffee queue, after a session, over dinner, walking between venues, or in the conversation that starts with, “How do you do this where you work?”
In Murcia, the formal programme created the shared focus, but the room itself carried much of the learning.
Why Murcia was the perfect venue for IncrEMentuM
Place mattered too, and Murcia felt like the right place for IncrEMentuM. Not simply because it was warm, welcoming and easy to enjoy, although all of that helped, but because it gave the event a particular kind of focus.
People travelled for the conference, and then found themselves in a city that seemed genuinely pleased to have them there. Murcia offered a real Spanish experience without becoming a distraction from the reason people had come. There was food, conversation, hospitality, warmth and a sense of place, but not the constant anxiety that you were missing some major landmark, exhibition, gallery or essential tourist experience by staying in the room.
That mattered more than I expected.
In a larger, more obvious destination — Madrid or Barcelona, for example — IncrEMentuM might have gained some things, but I suspect it would also have lost something. There is a particular tension at some conferences between being present for the programme and feeling that you should be outside seeing the city. Murcia reduced that tension. It allowed the conference to be the reason for being there, while still giving delegates a memorable and recognisably Spanish experience around it.
The city did not compete with the event. It held it.
That is not a small thing. The best conferences do not end when the final slide disappears. They continue in corridors, restaurants, late conversations and unexpected introductions. Ideas often develop in those spaces. Collaborations begin there. Professional friendships deepen there. People become more than names, roles or institutions.
Murcia seemed to make that easier. You could see that in the small groups walking back to hotels, still talking through cases, systems and sessions, passing the now-familiar outdoor tables in the streets around the venue.
It had enough energy to make the event feel alive, but not so much noise that the conference became secondary. It gave people space to gather, talk, eat, walk and return. It made the in-person element feel worthwhile not just because people were in the same auditorium, but because they were sharing the same place.
Spanish Emergency Medicine and professional identity
There was also something significant about the setting. IncrEMentuM took place in Spain at a time when Emergency Medicine there has a strong sense of momentum and identity. That gave the event an additional context. It was not just an international educational conference that happened to be in Murcia. It felt connected to a broader professional story.
Specialty identity is built through training programmes, curricula, examinations, departments and systems. But it is also built through events like this: through shared standards, visible role models, debate, simulation, and seeing a community take its own work seriously.
There was celebration, but it did not feel complacent. There was pride, but also challenge. The event did not simply say, “Emergency Medicine is important.” It asked how emergency clinicians think, communicate, lead, decide and improve.
That distinction matters. A specialty grows not only by declaring what it is, but by continuing to ask what it should become.
What IncrEMentuM teaches us about educational design
The most useful reflection I took from Murcia was that educational design matters. A conference is not simply a programme. It is an experience shaped by sequence, contrast, timing, recovery, surprise and reflection.
The smaller faculty, repeated across multiple formats, was part of that design. So were the simulations, hosted conversations, videos, translation, staging and use of Murcia itself. None of that happened by accident, and none of it was the work of one person.
Events like IncrEMentuM depend on organisers, educators, simulation teams, technical staff, speakers, volunteers, sponsors, venue teams, translators and delegates. Much of that work is invisible when things go well, which is probably how it should be.
Good conferences are not about the most visible roles. They are about the learning that becomes possible in the room.
The bottom line from IncrEMentuM 2026
IncrEMentuM 2026 was ambitious, energetic and deliberately different. No conference is perfect, and not every format will work equally well for every delegate. The real value of any educational event is only seen later, in what people remember, discuss, question, adapt and use.
But from Murcia, there was plenty to reflect on.
IncrEMentuM offered a model of Emergency Medicine education that paid attention not only to content, but to context: attention, emotion, rehearsal, conversation, translation, continuity, place and community. It also showed that useful disruption often comes from people willing to take risks. In this case, a group of Spanish Emergency Physicians created something independent, ambitious and distinctive, without the safety net of a large institutional structure behind them.
For three days, clinicians from at least 49 countries and territories came together in Murcia to think about the work of Emergency Medicine. That, in itself, felt valuable. Not because any conference has all the answers, but because shared learning still matters. Because seeing how others approach the same problems still matters. Because being reminded that Emergency Medicine is both local and global still matters.
And because, sometimes, being in the room together helps us return to our own rooms — our departments, resus bays, teams and patients — with a little more clarity about the work we are trying to do.
