Updates in Emergency Medicine

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Thanks to the support of The Ireland Funds, the course “Updates in Emergency Medicine” has been held on an annual basis in Dublin at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland with over 120 Irish physicians attending. The course has had a direct impact on medicine in Ireland on many different levels.

Emergency medicine is now a recognized specialty with academic training available in Ireland. Several Irish physicians have been invited to do post graduate training in emergency medicine in the USA with the expectation that they will return home afterwards. Faculty have collaborated on several projects and visited medical institutions in both the United States and Ireland. Finally, emergency medical care has greatly improved in Ireland, directly impacting on the health of its population. Over the last four year’s, this course has been designed to help develop the specialty of emergency medicine in Ireland. Although medical emergencies have always existed, only in the last several decades has emergency medicine evolved into a recognized specialty. The United States and the United Kingdom were the first to recognize the need for a physician to be properly trained in this discipline.

There are approximately 1.2 million visits to emergency departments in Ireland each year. Until recently, emergency departments in Ireland were often staffed with junior physicians who had little or no experience in treating acute life threatening emergencies. Often they were left unsupervised with no means to learn the principles and practice of emergency medicine.

Recognizing the need to improve the quality of emergency medical care in Ireland, Dr. John D. Cahill created the course “Updates in Emergency Medicine”. Dr. Cahill, trained both in Ireland and the United States, understands how emergency medicine is practiced on both sides of the Atlantic. The goals of the initial course were to introduce the basic principles and practice of emergency medicine, to help develop an academic training program in emergency medicine, and to promote collaboration between emergency medicine physicians between the two countries. With this in mind, Dr. Cahill met with Mr. Aidan Gleeson who is the head consultant in emergency medicine at Beaumont hospital in Dublin. Their enthusiasm to introduce a course of this nature was only dimmed by the matter of how to fund it. Fortunately, The Ireland Funds was able to offer a grant to allow this educational endeavor to occur.

The first course was held in the fall of 2001 at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and was a tremendous success. All participating faculty members generously donated their time to teach the course. The faculty was comprised of leading experts in emergency medicine and came from both leading Irish and American institutions and medical schools: the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Beaumont Hospital, Brown University, Harvard University, and Columbia University. Dr. Cahill also published the textbook “Updates in Emergency Medicine”, based upon the curriculum of the course.

The next course will be held in May 2006.
For more information: www.rcsi.ie

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