St Emlyn’s at the London Trauma Conference – Day 3

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The final day of the London Trauma Conference 2014 concentrated on pre-hospital emergency medicine and air ambulance operations. The day was hosted by the Norwegian Air Ambulance and had a mix of Scandinavian and international speakers.

A wide range of subjects were covered, from education and training to sobering talks about how we deal with it when EMS tragedies occur. Each speaker gave their audience much to ponder, including the value of physician-manned EMS, how we educate our trainees and ourselves and potential future therapies such as REBOA.

Cliff Reid, as ever, gave a fabulous talk, focusing on how we can train to perform as clinicians and strive for personal mastery. Sydney HEMS clearly has a tremendous education strategy, but is also constantly striving for improvement, making each course better than the last. It caused me to wonder how we could use some of his education principles not only in our prehospital service, but also in our ED.

The London Air Ambulance has rightly received many plaudits for its work on REBOA and Sammy Sadek gave us all an insight both into the procedure itself and the effort it took to get the entire system engaged to make it happen.

A session on transporting “difficult” patients concentrated on the dreaded triumvirate of the mad (or bad), bariatric and infectious patients. Ketamine infusions were recommended for sedation of the psychologically disturbed, transfering these patients unintubated safely, whilst the ramping of the larger ones to get good ear to sternal notch alignment prior to intubation was reinforced.

Immediately after lunch was a remarkable and truly sobering session about two tragic recent EMS fatal helicopter crashes in Norway and Glasgow. The speakers bravely related the events that had happened to their colleagues and friends giving all in the hall pause for thought, hoping against hope that they would never have to face the same themselves.

The day ended with some “quick hit” discussions about a varied set of topics, including the use of cervical collars, pre hospital blood products and tranexamic acid, as well as Cliff promoting the virtues of apnoeic oxygenation and Mark Wilson showing us a demo of the truly remarkable GoodSam app.

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It’s been a great three days at the London Trauma Conference. Thank you so much to the team for allowing us to join them and helping us record interviews with some of the speakers. Special mention to the fabulous Siobhra Murphy, PR guru for both the LTC and London Air Ambulance who was key to everything we have achieved here.

We hope you have enjoyed the podcasts and tweets from the conference.

BW,

Iain

 

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Cite this article as: Iain Beardsell, "St Emlyn’s at the London Trauma Conference – Day 3," in St.Emlyn's, December 11, 2014, https://www.stemlynsblog.org/ltc-day-3/.

1 thought on “St Emlyn’s at the London Trauma Conference – Day 3”

  1. Pingback: Impact Brain Apnoea with Gareth Davies from London HEMS. St.Emlyn's - St.Emlyn's

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