CAEP Conference 2023 – Strong Geriatric Emergency Medicine Presence

The Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians (CAEP) had its annual conference this May hosted in Toronto, Canada. Over the past several years, we have been overjoyed to see an increasing amount of geriatric emergency medicine content interspersed throughout the conference.

For the first year, we introduced to CAEP the Learning Expo! There were four key groups of educational stalls including Geriatrics, Pediatrics, Simulation and Rural Medicine. Within our Geriatrics booths, we covered numerous topics each delivered by Canadian emergency providers with geriatric expertise including:

  • Geriatric immersive simulation
  • Head trauma in geriatric patients
  • Five things to change in your practice for geriatric pharmacology
  • Setting up a geriatric comfort cart in your ED
  • Paramedic and emergency physician collaboration to improve geriatric emergency care
  • Applying the CAEP Position Statement to improve care for older patients in your ED
  • Better care for older people in the ED through GEM research 

We had fantastic feedback for this interactive event, and the participants were very engaged with each of the educational stalls!

During our track presentations, we had a panel on how to create a geriatric ED with general principles on feasible interventions for any ED, as well as practical examples from both a small rural ED and a large tertiary ED.

We also had numerous presentations on research related to head injuries in older people, including derivation of a clinical decision rule to guide CT head use in older adults who have fallen, predicting the severity of head injury with a senior-friendly GCS, and predictors of mortality in older patients with moderate TBI.

There were many other fantastic presentations, and we cannot wait for next year’s conference to continue to bring high-yield geriatric research and education to our emergency medicine colleagues across Canada.  

Dr. Rebecca Schonnop, Membership & Communications Lead on behalf of the CAEP Geriatric Emergency Medicine Committee, Canada