DevelopingEM is a new direction in medical education, combining cutting edge training in critical care medicine, with a focus on providing a meaningful contribution to medical professionals in developing regions through an inclusive and philanthropic approach.

DevelopingEM is a not for profit conference organising agency specialising in providing a practical clinical approach to the delivery of emergency medicine and critical care education to senior practitioners in the fields of emergency medicine, intensive and critical care medicine, anaesthetics, and prehospital and retrieval medicine.

With short sharp, polished presentations focusing on evidence based best practice we provide a clinically relevant educational experience aimed at the senior practitioner.

Drs Lee Fineberg and Mark Newcombe are the directorial team with a collective experience in the field of emergency medicine of over thirty years.

This team is flexible and innocative, as well as having a well established ambition to organise critical care conferences around the globe.

In 2016 the conference will be run by KRD Event Production, a team of resourceful and creative marketing professionals who specialise in the development, execution and evaluation or marketing solutions. These solutions include event management and promotional merchandise programs.

We hope as a group to maintain an independence of direction and flexibility of action by remaining unaligned to established medical and pharmaceutical bodies.

Our evolution was in the Australian context, and in the longer term we hope to continue an Australian focus but also to take the concept to areas where critical care medicine is evolving to allow subsidised education of practitioners in this setting as well

Our Aims and Objectives

DevelopingEM has at its heart several core aims and objectives.

1. An Innovative Program
2. A Specific Target Audience
3. Educational Collaboration
4. Regional Involvement
5. Not for profit financially unsupported model 

1) An Innovative Program

The medical component will have a practical clinical thrust with short, sharp, polished case based presentations with a focus on “best practice” in critical care medicine.

Critical to the venture will be the inclusion of different types of learning experiences in the form of workshops as well as discussion groups.

Core topics will include adult critical care medicine, paediatric critical care medicine, trauma medicine, medicine and its interaction with information technology, medical education, practical and theoretical point of care ultrasonography, and approaches to global health through critical care medicine.

• The content of the conference is entirely decided by the organising committee.
• There is no industry or supporter involvement and no abstract submission process.
• The committee allies generated topic areas with experts in the field concerned.
• The topic areas are formulated through a needs assessment of existent practice gaps.

Our program, by aiming at improving the already high level of senior practitioner competence and performance, will have at its core the objective of improving patient safety and outcome, both in resource rich and poor clinical environments.

The multimodal model and multiply themed sessions will aim to improve clinician performance across the spectrum of health care from clinical performance, to quality, education, health advocacy and leadership.

The educational ethos of DevelopingEM started at a very grass roots level.

There appeared to be a growing dissatisfaction with contemporary forms of conference based education, with an apparent focus on either academic theoretical medicine that was hard to translate to everyday clinical performance or a very basic level of understanding that most senior practitioners felt did not add to their own experiential knowledge base.

In determining what subjects to cover at our conferences we have combined this anecdotal impression of the current options available for education with formal feedback methods as well as a review of new government ministry and critical care society clinical guidelines and position statements.

Topics raised at local grand rounds, Morbidity and Mortality meetings and clinical governance days as well as the institution of new procedural and other practices were also factored in to our considerations.

We have also analysed recent landmark journal articles as well as reports by the National Institute of Clinical Studies (NICS), National Safety and Quality health Service Standards (NSQHS) and the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare, as well as articles dealing with closing evidence practice gaps.

By evaluating this wide range of both local and general information we have attempted to determine practice gaps and generated topics and processes aimed at closing these knowledge and performance gaps.

We hope to continuously update our knowledge on practice gaps and ongoing needs by allowing our delegates to provide feedback at the conference, using questionnaires, as well as at 6 and 12 months following the conference using web based survey tools.

The aim is thus not only to determine whether there are ongoing practice gaps but also to evaluate whether existing gaps have been remedied.

For example has knowledge on correct resuscitation strategies in trauma translated to the implementation of hospital guidelines (eg Code Crimson guidelines) in the delegates workplace that closes those gaps and improves patients outcomes.

 Types of Activities provided;

 Plenary presentations

Although an evidence and case based presentation format is not novel, we hope that by focusing on the particular needs of senior practitioners, who have heard it all before and already have a wealth of knowledge, that we are more likely to achieve improvement in overall practice, at an individual, departmental and global level.

 Workshops

Small group workshops will aim to focus and improve practical skill bases related to topics such as bedside ultrasonography, train the trainer medical simulation education, CT interpretation and prehospital and retrieval medicine.

 Discussion Groups

Optional discussion groups will aim to broaden perspective on topics such as Information Technology, Politics and Global Health and their relationship to Emergency Medicine. 

2) Specific Target Audience

We have specifically aimed our education at practitioners who are primarily clinicians in critical care.

This includes emergency physicians, intensivists, anaesthetists, prehospital providers and nursing staff.

Fundamentally we are aiming to provide information that can add to the senior clinicians’ management repertoire, and that they can take back to their workplace and utilise on the very next clinical shift to benefit patient outcome.

Whilst we are aiming our education at the senior cohorts of this group we hope aiming high will also benefit trainees in these disciplines.

Given our target audience are senior practitioners with years of experience we see this as a particular issue.

Some senior practitioners are often rigid in their performance based on experience, and practice is potentially difficult to alter.

By focusing on this group we have generated topics specifically aimed at providing new insights that can be additive to practice in this group.

The entirety of the presentation program will be focused on providing new management strategies over and above the standards that have governed this practitioner group.

Also we hope that by continuing a focus on innovation in bedside practice with ultrasonography and novel educational modalities such as simulation that there will be new opportunities to broaden the horizons of this group.

By including opportunities for discussion we also hope to broaden independent thought on non clinical issues with resultant increase in patient advocacy.

3) Educational Collaboration

This remains a particular strength of DevelopingEM.

Through our program we aim to introduce an international faculty to the critical care community to enhance the sharing of critical care information on a global scale.

Our expanding faculty includes presenters and demonstrators from multiple fields of Medicine including Emergency Medicine, PreHospital and Retrieval Medicine, Paediatrics, Surgery, Anaesthetics and Intensive Care, from multiple countries.

We also have involved educational groups from outside our organisation to aid with the provision of previously unavailable education in the form of satellite workshops.

Previously these have taken the form of ultrasonography workshops and ATLS courses.

Beyond our immediate educational goals, we also hope to grow a network of Emergency Medicine and Critical Care specialists with an interest in the provision of medical education, training, and health care to underserved regions of the developing world.

As well as developing an expanding group of educators we have also established links with a number of academic colleges and societies including the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine (ACEM), Australasian Society of Emergency Medicine (ASEM), American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), National Association of EMS Physicians (NAEMSP), and International Federation for Emergency Medicine (IFEM).

4) Regional Involvement

One of the cornerstones to the DevelopingEM concept is direct involvement with regional bodies and individuals in the host country.

Our first overseas conference, DevelopingEM 2013 in Havana Cuba will remain the model for future conferences.

Our venture in Cuba included the formal involvement of the Cuban medical bodies, Cuban leaders in the fields of Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine and individual practitioners from Cuba and the Caribbean.

Individual practitioners were involved as sponsored delegates as well as presenters.

Regional workshops allied to the conference were also a feature of DevelopingEM 2013 and one we hope to continue into the future.

To facilitate the regional involvement our Havana conference had bilingual translation and we aim to repeat this service in the future.

In the longer term we hope to establish ongoing links within the regions where the conference occurs.

In 2014 we repeated this successful model in Salvador, Brazil and in 2015 we returned to Havana. This year is our first foray into South Asia with the conference situated in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

5) Not for Profit Financially Unsupported Model

Central to the philosophy of our concept is the not for profit model.

We have avoided industry sponsorship in order to prevent content conflict of interest.

There is no advertising material of any sort to compromise the learning experience of the delegates.

Conference registration fees and donations alone will be used to fund the ongoing costs of the annual conference.

Funds generated from conference registration will be utilised to subsidise the attendance of regional delegates, the establishment of future conferences, and ongoing continuing education projects.

There are no payments to the management team and there are no salaried employees.

We have, in a limited fashion, assisted with faculty travel in the past.

The organising committee and all those involved in the creation of the program have agreed to full disclosure of any competing interests.

This model has been a successful financial model for the last two conferences with costs covered and enough credit to cover start up costs of the subsequent conference.