June 2022: Weaving global health into ED: partners, mentors and fellowships
We kicked off the event by hearing from EM global health (GH) fellows Molly Howarth-Maddison, Imara Gluning and Bethany Fenby-Hodgson from the North Manchester, Bristol and Leeds programmes. We heard about the differences between each fellowship and the opportunities it offers to those who take it on. These fellowships are growing in number across the UK, another being hosted by the team at Chelsea & Westminister.
We are especially grateful to our partners at Doctors Worldwide, the Faculty of Remote, Rural and Humanitarian Healthcareand of course the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (who supported the event). Not only did our partners offer an insight into the global opportunities they offer, but they laid the path for future collaboration.
Finally we got to meet face to face once again in Manchester this June. Despite national rail strikes creating some havoc, lots of you made it from as far apart as The Shetland Islands and Bristol, and many in between!
We then took a different look at some of the logistics of bringing GH into EM. Katherine Potier from North Manchester talked us through how she and her team had developed a GH EM fellowship from scratch and how she had been able to get her trust on board with it. Moving from trainee-level engagement, Caroline Heggie told us all about her consultant role in NHS Shetland which allows her to work clinically in Scotland, whilst being supported to work in a GH role as part of her yearly work cycle – if this looks exciting, check out their job advert for new colleagues! And then of course there is a elephant in the room, we talk always of the importance of the multi-disciplinary team, but where are all the fellowships aimed at the wider healthcare team delivering emergency care? Sara Visus-Marco discussed the opportunities and challenges of taking up a GH EM fellowship as an EM staff nurse in Bristol. Her reflections were inspiring and leave us all with the challenge as to how we can make this work more widely, and especially how we can advocate for the importance of funding these posts.
Before we descended into the clamour of our speed networking session, which it’s fair to say, everyone thoroughly enjoyed, we were expertly led through our workshop session by Bristol’s Andy Lockyer. The room was tasked with how we should evaluate and measure the success of GH fellowships in EM: who are the stakeholders with an interest? What and how can we measure effectively to prove success? Whilst we left with more questions than answers, this was a key brainstorming step and we look forward to hearing more about this evolving initiative.
Finally as some of us said our goodbyes, circa half the group headed to dinner to carry on the conversation- a few lending a hand in a pre-hospital trauma case along the way… all in a day’s work, hey?
To everyone who joined for the event & wanted to join but for any reason could not: THANK YOU! Your support, interest and energy is what keeps this collaborative worthwhile
