GMIT host "Integration and the Emergency Services" conference

100 delegates from branches of the emergency services in the west are to attend the region’s first ever conference on integration of the services, in GMIT Castlebar on Thursday 13 September 2012.

Organised by the GMIT Department of Nursing & Health Sciences in association with Mayo General Hospital, the one-day event in GMIT will explore the differing roles performed by the various emergency services – both paid and voluntary sectors, and how these services collaborate in critical situations.

The first part of the conference will feature a series of short talks by academics and personnel involved in pre-hospital and hospital care such as emergency department consultants, paramedics, nurses, GPs, the Irish Coast guard and the Air Corps and wilderness retrieval experts. The focus of the talks is the integration of multidisciplinary care and the specifics of retrieval and transfer from and across diverse environments and settings.

The early afternoon session will centre around a state of the art computer-based emergency simulation exercise and the later afternoon will feature live scale demonstrations of emergency care provision, retrieval and transfer by the Fire Service, Paramedics, Coast Guard helicopter and Mayo and Sligo Mountain Rescue Teams. These exercises will include a live simulation of casualty extraction from a vehicle at a road traffic accident and emergency helicopter retrieval and winching.

Registration is free but places are strictly limited to 100 and the conference is now fully booked.

Dr Andrew Jackson, lecturer in the GMIT Dept of Nursing & Health Sciences, and Mr Michael McDonagh, CNM2 in the Emergency Department in Mayo General Hospital, co-ordinators of the event say the conference should be of interest to anyone involved with emergency care from pre-hospital through to the emergency department, ward or operating theatre.

“Explicitly the conference is aimed to be multidisciplinary and explore avenues for possible smoother integration of services at a practical and policy level,” they state.