EMEC 2019

I booked for this course a few months back purely out of curiosity. I have often wondered how we achieve the balance between teaching and service provision in a busy emergency department. I was glad that I attended this conference where it was inspiring to hear from colleagues who described ideas on promoting teaching and making our own jobs more enriching in spite of the busy nature of our work. It is all about getting the balance right. I thought I will reflect on some of things I learnt and maybe inspire a few others who did not have the opportunity to attend this excellent meeting.

First of all kudos to the organising team for choosing such an inspiring venue, The Studio, in Birmingham city centre. The studio is one of the many new age meeting centres which have come up in our city centres which challenge and break rules with regards to meeting places. The place was conveniently located in the city centre with good rooms and an excellent dinner area. The choice of the after meeting catch up drinks, The Botanist, was excellent too.

The morning started with a stimulating talk about sex or should I say CEX by Simon McCormick. Although I found the frequent sexual innuendos tiresome, I was in the minority and the vast majority enjoyed such an unconventional speech. I completely liked the core message of the talk to embrace WPBA and to make it more useful and meaningful. If there is one thing I would take back to work it would be this because I have always found such form filling a bit tiresome and never really bought into it.

Next it was time for Rob Rogers from USA and Medutopia who talked eloquently about the importance of creating your own legacy but more importantly that education saves lives. Like me, if you have not come across Medutopia before I would strongly urge you to have a look at the website. Personally I found it quite inspiring because I do think we need to think of innovative ways to provide medical education for the future clinicians. The days of sitting and reading big textbooks is gone.

www.blog.mymedutopia.com

My favorite speaker of the day was Liz Herrieven. I loved the way the talk was delivered with not a single word to read on the slides, just pictures from 'Game of Thrones'. There were so many ideas I thought every emergency department could copy from her but my favourite was the educational resource box. Just a cupboard in the department with useful props to deliver short burst of teaching in emergency department.

My first work shop was the simulation lab. The team from Leicester, which by the way is the busiest emergency department in the whole of the country, were excellent. It made me wonder if such a busy department could commit itself to teaching then the other less busy departments have no excuse at all. Enjoyed making the model for lateral canthotomy. Most impressed by the #EM3 resus drills. These are essentially 15 minute drills which is broken into a 5 minute simulation scenario, a 5 minute reflection and a final 5 minute repetition of the scenario with the hindsight of the reflection and learning.

www.em3.org.uk

Ross Fischer's masterclass on how to do a presentation was excellent. The message was so basic sometimes it amazes me how most of us get it so wrong. I liked the idea of breaking it down into the the three fundamentals of Message, Media and Delivery.  He calls it the p cubed presentation style. It made me think about the innumerable times my presentations have fallen flat because I have messed up on one of the three fundamentals.

www.ffolliet.com or #htdap

Louis Daniels a counter terrorism officer was our mystery speaker. I liked the way he equated our ambulance pre alert to a phone call his cell would receive about a potential threat. Although the comparission was a little flattering I could see what he means by it. The key messages were to have a clear operational strategy, be familiar with your team, constantly reassess situation based on new information and finally remember to have hot and cold debriefs. If there is only onething I would take back it would be about the importance of debrief after every critical patient in resus like a poly trauma or a cardiac arrest.

John carter a very interesting and enterprising emergency physician from Edinburgh gave an inspirational talk about more or less his life story and how he approaches teaching in his own style. I could not help wonder how his creative talent could have easily been snuffed out by traditionalists. His way was to make pictures and art for teaching. He has one of the most creative brains and they maybe be difficult for us lesser mortals to replicate. However it was inspiring and I can only imagine how entertaining and stimulating his teaching sessions will be for the Edinburgh trainees.

www.prezi.com
www.pechakucha.com
www.mentimeter.com

Anu Mitra and Kamran Zafer from Charing cross hospital shared their experience of how they made the mundane departmental induction into a useful, entertaining and engaging experience for the new doctors. I think each and every department could learn something from them because we are letting down the young doctors through a rather forgetful day called 'Induction day'.

Finally it was time for the rather entertaining eduwars. This was a completely new thing for me and made me realize why can't other educational conferences be this entertaining and useful. Overall I was very impressed with the team behind EMEC and would like to thank them for one of the most entertaining and useful conferences I have ever attended. Special mention must be made of Nikki Abela who had the arduous task of making multiple short presentations on the theory of teaching.

Thank you for reading this. Have a great day and enjoy whatever you do because as per the chaos theory everything is connected. So go on and make a little change in the world around you so that you create a tsunami of enjoyable medical education for the future doctors.