A/Professor Sally McCarthy MBBS FACEM MBA FIFEM, past President of ACEM, is an emergency medicine physician at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney, and Director ED South East Regional Hospital Bega, NSW. Previously Director ED at tertiary and smaller hospitals, in 2011 she established the Emergency Care Institute at the NSW Agency for Clinical Innovation.
Co-chaired by Dr Eddy Lang and Dr Kim Hansen, with leadership also provided by medical student Arshia Javidan, the IFEM Emergency Department Crowding and Access Block Taskforce has synthesized a report detailing the future of emergency medicine as it relates to crowding, with findings salient to the COVID-19 pandemic and understanding where we go from here.
The Paediatric Emergency Medicine Special Interest Group (PEMSIG) continues to offer expertise as many of our members are at the front lines taking clinical care of patients and further more at the helm of decision making for their institutions and regions. We have been sought out to share our individual and collective experiences by multiple associations around the globe.
The IFEM Paediatric Emergency Medicine Special Interest Group (PEMSIG) has completed the translation of the Standards for the Care of Children in Emergency Departments V3 into Spanish and the document has been submitted for approval by the Executive.
In May PEMSIG also published an editorial on the Standards for Care of Children in Emergency Departments document in the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine.
It is raining – with thunder – outside as I write my final message as IFEM President. A fitting atmosphere, perhaps. The world is trembling from Covid-19. Countries have taken incredibly different approaches to this pandemic, despite very clear and standard information coming from the medical experts. When I look at the ‘let’s safely acquire herd immunity’ approach in Sweden and compare it to the rigid controls in Hong Kong or the ‘this is nothing’ approach in Brazil,