Record attendance at emergency medicine conference

Dr Egerton-Warburton

Monash Emergency clinicians and researchers were well represented at the highlight of the Australasian Emergency Medicine scientific calendar, the 2014 Australasian College for Emergency Medicine (ACEM) annual conference last week, with a record 999 delegates attending the event in Melbourne.

Conference scientific convenor and Director of emergency medicine research at Monash Medical Centre, Dr Diana Egerton-Warburton presented two sessions on alcohol harm that attracted significant media attention.

Dr Egerton-Warburton also presented a paper on Monash Health’s “Just Say No to Just in case cannula" policy.  This successful change initiative at Monash Medical Centre has demonstrated at 20% absolute reduction of PIVC insertion as well as a reduction in PIVC associated staph bacteraemia rates.

Professor Andis Graudins presented in the best fellows paper session about the PICHFORK trial. Published recently in Annals of Emergency Medicine, the randomised controlled trial compared intranasal fentanyl and ketamine for moderate to severe pain in children with isolated limb injury in the emergency department (ED), giving paediatric clinicians a choice for the first time in the analgesics they can now offer intranasally.

A leading clinical toxicologist, Professor Graudins was also involved in two platform sessions at the conference: one discussing the management of severe cardiovascular drug poisoning and the use of novel and emerging antidotal treatments in this class of poisoning and the second about the course and management of modified-release paracetamol poisoning in Australia.

Meanwhile, Monash Health trainee Dr Deidre Glynn received the award for best abstract presentation by an ACEM trainee.  Dr Glynn’s paper, “An accelerated diagnostic pathway for the assessment of chest pain in the emergency department:  clinical outcome and risk stratification,” was an audit of the current accelerated diagnostic pathway (ADP) and showed that ADP was safe and effective in assessing and stratifying low-risk cardiac chest pain presentations to the ED with a negligible rate of major adverse cardiac events in the study population.

Monash University adjunct lecturer and Monash Health physician Dr Michaela Mee organised day four of the program, “Our Patients, Ourselves” together with colleague Dr Chris Mobbs.  Focussing on physician wellness, the sessions focussed on the benefits to patients of physicians who look after themselves.  Topics included burnout, work-life balance, cultural aspects of emergency medicine, ethics, and medicine and creativity.

Monash Health emergency department’s Drs Simon Craig and John Cheek also presented original research and plenary sessions in the paediatric emergency medicine stream at the conference. These included presentations on paediatric UTI, recent literature in PEM, procedural pain and distress, drug safety during paediatric resuscitation, and paediatric fracture management. Additional presentations from Monash Children’s staff included Sharon Teo presenting on urine clean catch contamination rates, and Daryl Cheng presenting on the effect of a category 2 pager on clinical outcomes in paediatric patients.

Of note, a number of BMedSci students from the School of Clinical Sciences (SCS) also presented at the conference, including Shirley Wong on Rational CTU ordering in suspected renal colic, Lucia Nguyen on critical procedures in paediatric emergency medicine, Jess Deitch on paediatric appendicitis, and Sarah McBride on paediatric PIVC.