Emergency medicine looks very different depending on where you stand.
For some of us, emergency care means a well-resourced department, established systems, specialist training programs and ready access to diagnostics, intensive care and definitive treatment.
Elsewhere, emergency care is being delivered in health systems still building their foundations.
In conflict zones, clinicians may be working with damaged hospitals, interrupted supply chains, mass casualties and profound shortages of staff and equipment.
And in many countries, the development of emergency care continues to be influenced by international organisations, visiting clinicians and models of care imported from elsewhere.
On the final afternoon of DevelopingEM 2026 in Saint Lucia, our Global Emergency Medicine track will explore that much bigger picture.
Global Emergency Medicine — from people who have actually done it
The session is led by Dr Natalie Thurtle, Clinical Director of the Emergency Departments at North West Regional Hospital and Mersey Community Hospital in Australia, and former Medical Coordinator with Médecins Sans Frontières.
Her experience reflects what we want this session to be about: not global emergency medicine as an abstract academic exercise, but emergency care as it is actually delivered, developed and challenged around the world.
Across the afternoon, faculty with experience in conflict, health-system development and international emergency medicine will examine where global emergency care has come from — and where it needs to go next.
Emergency care in forgotten conflicts: Sudan
Dr Amy Neilson opens the afternoon by looking at emergency care in Sudan.
Some conflicts dominate international attention.
Others progressively disappear from the headlines despite continuing humanitarian catastrophe.
For clinicians trying to provide emergency care, however, the consequences remain very real.
What does emergency medicine look like when health infrastructure itself becomes part of the casualty?
How do clinicians prioritise, improvise and continue providing care when resources, referral pathways and sometimes even basic security can no longer be assumed?
Sudan provides a confronting setting in which to examine what emergency care means when almost every component of a functioning health system is under pressure.
Lessons learned in developing emergency care systems
Global emergency medicine is not only about responding to disasters.
Much of the work is slower, less visible and ultimately perhaps more important: helping countries develop emergency care systems that can function every day.
Dr Terry Mulligan will examine lessons learned from the development of emergency care systems internationally.
What works?
What doesn’t?
And perhaps most importantly, how do we move beyond importing systems developed in wealthy countries and instead support emergency care structures appropriate to local populations, resources, geography and workforce?
Building an emergency care system is not simply about training more emergency physicians.
It involves triage, nursing, prehospital care, referral networks, education, data collection, governance and integration with the wider health system.
The lessons from countries that have already travelled this road have enormous relevance to regions where emergency medicine is now rapidly developing.
Emergency care in conflict: Gaza and Lebanon
Conflict places extraordinary demands upon emergency clinicians and health systems.
Dr Mina Naguib will examine emergency care in Gaza and Lebanon, where clinicians have faced the intersection of trauma, displacement, infrastructure disruption and overwhelming demand.
The clinical challenges are obvious.
The wider questions are harder.
How do emergency systems function when hospitals themselves are threatened? How are scarce resources allocated when demand exceeds anything a conventional emergency department was designed to manage? And what responsibilities do the international emergency medicine and humanitarian communities have when local health systems are overwhelmed?
These are uncomfortable subjects.
They are also part of contemporary emergency medicine.
Structural decolonisation of global emergency care
Global health has increasingly been forced to examine its own history and assumptions.
For decades, international healthcare projects have often involved expertise, priorities, research agendas and funding flowing from wealthier countries towards lower-resource settings.
Even when well intentioned, that model can reproduce unequal relationships.
Dr Shama Patel will explore the structural decolonisation of global emergency care.
Who decides what a health system needs?
Who controls funding?
Who determines the research questions?
Who receives authorship and recognition?
And when international clinicians leave, what remains?
This isn’t about abandoning international collaboration. It is about making that collaboration more equitable, locally led and sustainable.
For anyone who has worked, taught, researched or volunteered internationally, it is a conversation worth having.
Timor-Leste: what happens at the international interface?
After afternoon tea, Dr Aruna Shivam turns the discussion towards Timor-Leste and the impact of the international interface with emergency care.
International engagement can bring expertise, resources, education and connections.
It can also create duplication, dependency or systems poorly suited to the environment in which they are expected to operate.
Timor-Leste provides an opportunity to examine what happens where international emergency medicine meets a developing national emergency care system — including what has helped, what has not, and what we should learn from that experience.
What’s next for Global Emergency Care?
It is deliberately an open question and Nat will conclude the afternoon by bringing the faculty together to consider this question.
The next phase of global emergency medicine probably shouldn’t look exactly like the last one.
The specialty is expanding internationally. Emergency care systems are developing across Africa, Asia, the Pacific, the Caribbean and Latin America. Local clinicians and organisations are increasingly defining their own priorities and building their own models.
At the same time, war, climate-related disasters, displacement and widening inequalities continue to place enormous pressure on emergency care systems.
The challenge is no longer simply to ask:
How can we bring emergency medicine to other places?
Perhaps the better questions are:
How can we support locally led emergency care systems?
What can different health systems learn from each other?
And what should genuinely equitable international emergency medicine look like?
Why this belongs at DevelopingEM
DevelopingEM has always been built around the idea that emergency medicine benefits when we get outside our own hospitals, our own health systems and sometimes our own assumptions.
Holding DevelopingEM 2026 in Saint Lucia makes that conversation particularly relevant.
The Caribbean sits at the intersection of small-island health systems, limited specialist resources, geographic isolation, disaster vulnerability and an extraordinary network of clinicians working to strengthen emergency care across the region.
So on our final afternoon in Saint Lucia, we are going global.
Sudan.
Gaza and Lebanon.
Timor-Leste.
Developing emergency care systems.
Decolonisation.
And finally, the question that ties the afternoon together:
Where does global emergency medicine go from here?
Join Natalie Thurtle, Amy Neilson, Terry Mulligan, Mina Naguib, Shama Patel, Aruna Shivam and the DevelopingEM faculty on Wednesday 18 November for one of the conversations we think emergency medicine needs to be having.
A Global View of Emergency Medicine has been a part of DevelopingEM right from the beginning in 2012 and is the perfect way to finish our plenary sessions this year.
JOIN US IN SAINT LUCIA.