Medic One Funded Projects
London Trauma Conference
Scott James - Final Year Medical Student
London Trauma Conference, Royal Geographical Society, London. 10-13 December 2013
For my year 5 elective I was able to spend 8 weeks between September and October 2013 with the pre-hospital trauma team from London’s Air Ambulance, based on the helipad at The Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. During the elective attachment myself and another medical student on elective from Peninsula Medical School, Craig Pascoe, undertook a national audit and literature review on the use of intra-nasal analgesia pre-hospital. This was initially presented at a local clinical governance day and following this we drafted an abstract for submission to the London Trauma Conference.
The abstract was subsequently chosen for a poster presentation. Initially due to costs involved I was only going to be able to attend one or two of the days the conference was being held. This would have been a missed opportunity to further my interest in pre-hospital care by missing out on what looked like an excellent programme, meeting current clinicians and students with a similar interest and having to pay doctor, rather than student rates in future years.
However, a recent award from the Medic One Trust Fund enabled me to attend the London Trauma Conference in its entirety. The programme was excellent and I was able to attend all of the days that had talks on topics of trauma, pre-hospital care and in-hospital trauma management. The core topics in trauma day aimed at senior medical students and junior doctors had a number of stimulating presentations on a wide range of topics from chemical terrorism and the provision of medical care at the recent London Olympics through to pavement to PCI for cardiac arrest patients and practical considerations for pre-hospital resuscitative thoracotomy.
The remainder of the conference contained a mix of academic talks surrounding topics such as what vasoactive drugs work in hypothermic patients, epidemiology talks on how to prevent trauma, fluid management of trauma patients and individual clinicians experiences on introducing pre-hospital CT scanning for stroke, carrying out REBOA and trauma care in Afghanistan.
Overall the conference had a highly varied programme that was very stimulating and has again reinforced my desire to specialise in Emergency and Pre-hospital Medicine post FY. I am thankful for the financial support from the Medic One trust that enabled me to attend the entirety of the conference.
Poster Presentation:
Pascoe C, James S, Smith C, Warner M, Weaver A, Lockey D. What UK pre-hospital providers use intranasal analgesia? A survey of its current and planned use by air ambulance services in the United Kingdom. London Trauma Conference. 10 – 13 December 2013.
