The latest news, views and opportunities from EWM Towers
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BBC Worldwide reports on Extreme Medicine
Really pleased we where about to help to the team from BBC Worldwide produce such an amazing piece on the this years Extreme Medicine Conference – next years conference promises to be even more ground-breaking; if your in the ‘know’ there are a limited number super priced early bird tickets available ….
- By Richard Hollingham, BBC
25 November 2015
The International World Extreme Medicine Conference in London is not for the faint-hearted.
As I sneak into the back of the main lecture hall, record-breaking polar explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes is in full flow – vividly describing the state of his companion’s frostbitten foot during an Arctic expedition. Fiennes details how a plate of rotten skin peeled away in his friend’s boot exposing the nerve ends. There are pictures. Even some of the hardened medics in the audience have to look away.
Sir Ranulph has travelled to the ends of the Earth to tackle the coldest, highest and most dangerous environments. Several times he has barely lived to tell the tale – suffering starvation, sickness and the loss of fingers to frostbite, some of which he amputated himself.
Read more….
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20151125-the-challenges-of-carrying-out-surgery-in-space
The Extreme Medicine Conference is home to the world’s most adventurous doctors, medics and experts in remote, expedition and pre-hospital medicine.
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Extreme Medicine '15 – Hot off the press…
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Extreme Medicine ’15 – Hot off the press…
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TV Medic needed…
If you’re an adventurous doc & fancy yourself on TV, we have a fantastic role for you! Our friends at Remote Trauma require a doctor for an activity-based TV programme. Role starts in Feb 2015 for 7-10weeks filming in North Africa.
Television programme with high risk activities requires an adventurous doctor for 7-10 weeks. Filming begins February 2015 in North Africa. You’ll be working as part of a risk management team and the role may involve some on screen time.
Position available for a UK-doctor on an action based expedition television programme with high risk activities. The project is for 7-10 weeks in North Africa working as part of a risk management team. May involve some on screen appearance. Start date February 2015. Please email [email protected] for more information.
Course of interest
Speakers, content and line up firming up as Extreme Medicine 2014 gets closer. Medics, Astronauts, Scientists, and the extraordinary all feature
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2 day Pre-Hospital Care workshop presented by Extreme Medicine & London Air Ambulance during the two days prior to Extreme Medicine Conference
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2 day Pre-Hospital Care workshop presented by Extreme Medicine & London Air Ambulance during the two days prior to Extreme Medicine Conference
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Emergency Medicine Locum posts available Papua New Guinea 13 May 2014
Head Medical are recruiting on behalf of the world’s leading international healthcare and medical services company.
Our client is responsible for providing onsite primary and emergency medical assistance to the employees of many varied industries, including oil, gas and mining organisations in PNG. Located in the south-western Pacific Ocean, PNG is one of the most challenging, culturally diverse and exotic countries in the world.
The role of these locum positions is to care for Asylum seekers, we have one position available in Manus Island and one available in Nauru Island.
Manus Island 15th May (or ASAP) to 16th June | Nauru Island 23rd May to 4th July
Desired Skills and Experience
· Physician ER experience
· European US/UK/Australian training/experience
· Experience of providing primary care within a remote environment
Manus Island-You will be required to possess ACLS, ATLS is also desirable
Nauru Island-You will be required to possess PALS, ACLS and ATLS is also desirable
Competitive daily rate on offer. All onsite accommodation, food, facilities will be paid for and we will coordinate all flights/ transport per rotation.
If you are interested please contact Yan Scouller [email protected] or tel 0131 240 5274
Medical links of interest
Pre-Hospital Care Workshop with London Air Ambulance
London Air Ambulance and Extreme Medicine 2014
The world famous London Air Ambulance team will be joining the Extreme Medicine Conference in 2014 not only as highlighted speakers
during the main conference but also partnering to deliver a pre conference trauma workshop.
As details of this training event are confirmed why not watch their life-saving work on the BBC…. click here to find out more.
More…
London’s Air Ambulance features in BBC Two – An Hour To Save Your Life (#AHTSYL) – 3-part series starting 4th March, 9pm
This new series looks at innovations in emergency medicine and the improvements in patient outcomes as a result of doctor-led pre-hospital care and fast-tracking heart attack/cardiac arrest, stroke and trauma patients to specialist centres.
It was filmed over the summer of 2013, spending two months with London’s Air Ambulance including with our Physician Response Unit (PRU), a medical emergency fast response team who are tasked to out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients, at The Royal London and London Chest Hospitals and with the London Ambulance Service. Filming also took place in Nottingham and Birmingham.
Across the three programmes, nine patient stories are featured, five of these are involving London’s Air Ambulance in the pre-hospital phase. The key clinicians involved in each patient case conducted in-depth retrospective interviews so the style of the programmes is very much clinicians taking the audience through what happens.
Extreme Medicine 2014 Conference – London 8-11 November
Watch the film here…
World Extreme Medicine Expo – what it’s all about… from Expedition & Wilderness Medicine on Vimeo.
MBE for EWM Faculty Member
GP Dr Theo Weston has been appointed MBE for services to victims of trauma in Cumbria. Theo who has recently joined the Executive Council of BASICS
also flies with the North West Air Ambulance. He set up the BEEP Fund (Birbeck Emergency Equipment for Patients) in 1994 that has raised more than £400,000 to buy equipment needed for doctors providing prehospital emergency care throughout the North East.Theo said said:
“It’s a huge honour and a big surprise – I never dreamt I would be worthy of such a prestigious honour but I’m absolutely delighted. I also want to give credit to all the others who have supported me over the last 20 years, allowing me to do this kind of work. In particular my family have been so supportive, allowing me to drop things at the drop of a hat.”
Theo was one of the original founding faculty for the gold-standard Expedition Medicine course based just outside of Keswick.
http://www.expeditionmedicine.co.uk/index.php/products/events/-/pt-0010.html
CBS news features EWM Disaster Medicine workshop in Boston
As a pre conference workshop to the main Extreme Medicine Conference, hosted at Harvard Medical School, Expedition & Wilderness Medicine organised along with our partners at Harvard a really very realistic workshop to focus on the challenges of mass casualties in disaster area – more from CBS….
Terror simulation draws lessons from Boston Marathon, past disasters
OTIS AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, Mass. — First responders need to be ready for anything, whether it’s a massive natural disaster or a terrorist attack.
Few know that like the emergency physicians training in Harvard’s Disaster Medicine/Emergency Management Fellowship. Two weeks ago, five of the Harvard fellows were dispatched to the Philippines to respond to Typhoon Haiyan. Just a few weeks earlier, the Harvard fellows were hosting a major terror simulation that drew lessons from the Boston Marathon bombing and other past, man-made disasters.
“The unique thing about disaster response that makes it different from almost everything else is the fact that you’re responding to a unique event — every disaster is unique, in nature and both modality and scenario and environment in which it happens,” Greg Ciottone, the director of the Harvard program, told CBSNews.com.
Ciottone was a commander of one of the first federal disaster teams on the scene at Ground Zero after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. While no one can predict the scenarios where first responders will be needed, disaster simulations are still crucial, he said.
“We’re forced to respond using a multitude of agencies and personnel that don’t normally work together,” he said, “so what you don’t want to have happen is have all these different agencies come together for the first time in a real live disaster event, and that’s why we conduct these drills as often as we can.”
Disaster simulations are common in the post 9/11 era, but the one that Ciottone and his team conducted at the Otis Air National Guard Base in Massachusetts was unique in its size and scope. The Harvard event brought together the National Guard, the Cambridge Police, the Massachusetts Reserve Corps, paramedics, ER physicians and others. It was coordinated to coincide with the Second Annual International Extreme Medicine Expo — hosted this year in Boston — so the participants and observers came from around the world.
The event started by applying makeup — in this case, called moulage — to 92 volunteers pretending to be victims. Kathy Cardeiro, a retired nurse from Bourne, Mass., joined the Massachusetts Reserve Corps (MRC) a couple of years ago, but the volunteer work has meant more to her since the Marathon bombing.
“I think we’ve probably learned a lot from that, how to cope and also learned a lot that people in general all want to help, whether they’re MRC, there are a lot of people that step out, and step up,” she said.
Ciottone and his team created a scenario that started with a lone shooter — a scene now all too common in the U.S. Police arrived to find more than a dozen injured. Paramedics started to arrive, but the scene was complicated by a second incident — a bomb exploding.
This kind of second attack — typically designed to target first responders — has become a common tactic around the world. It may have been what the Boston bombers intended to do with their second device.
After the explosion, there were dozens of more victims to treat, and seven of the first responders were “killed.” The remaining responders — who were not told ahead of time what the scenario would be — suddenly had to reassess the situation and shift their priorities.
“It started off almost textbookish in terms of the initial wave of responders doing their job appropriately, then it broke down a little bit when we lost that first group of responders,” said Jonathan Siegel, a paramedic and supervisor with Cataldo Ambulance Service who participated in the simulation. “The next group of responders came in and were not able to recognize that the command and control roles needed to be backfilled in order for the rest of this to run smoothly.”
After the event, Ciottone explained that the first responders spent too much time triaging and assessing each potential victim — typically the right move — except in a case like this, where quick, immediate action like applying a tourniquet can save lives. In fact, tourniquets were only recently added as standard equipment for Boston EMS, but they proved crucial on April 15.
“The amputations — we saw them the Boston Marathon,” Ciottone explained to the event participants. “The reason that only people two or three killed at the Boston Marathon were from the bombing itself and nobody else was killed, despite the fact there were 30 to 40 life threatening injuries… people jumped quickly with those tourniquets.”
Knowing when to stop to triage a victim is stressful enough, but first responders also have to think about logistics. With dozens of victims down, several ambulances were called to the scene. Ciottone explained after the fact that the scene was inspired by the 1990 Avianca plane crash, when ambulances approached the Long Island, New York crash scene on a narrow road. Once they were there, the ambulances were stuck in a bottleneck.
“We did put a couple obstacles there, they were the blasted out ambulances from the first responders,” he said. “But what we were hoping was you would actually complete that circle, realize that someone needs to get out and help maneuver and move around those obstacles. Instead, what was done, the ambulances came up and made their own route a different way, which had some pluses and minuses to it.”
In many ways, the drill went nothing like it was planned, said Mike Rubin, one of the Harvard fellows who helped organize the event — but that, in a sense, made it more realistic.
“There’s no definite protocol to follow, so you have to reinvent the wheel with every disaster to accommodate the factors,” Rubin said. “It requires some snap decisions and there’s no time to question whether you’re doing the right thing or not.”
© 2013 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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