DevelopingEM Fiji to Support Attendance of 52 Regional Delegates

Dear Fellow Emergency Clinicians and DevelopingEMers

This year DevelopingEM brings our concept of a supported and collaborative emergency medicine meeting to the Pacific, specifically to Fiji. In brief DevelopingEM is an Australia-based group of emergency physicians who help organise conferences in areas of the globe where our specialty is rapidly developing.

By attracting emergency clinicians from countries with developed systems (Australasia, North America, Europe and elsewhere) with the promise of excellent education aimed at the senior on-the-floor clinician who's heard it all before, DevelopingEM is able to also support clinicians from the host nation and surrounding region.

We use the fees from international delegates to fund the attendance of colleagues from the region. In fact, this income is our sole funding source with no pharmaceutical or medical device industry support. Each local organising group decides where we allocate these fees.

In general this strategy has resulted in local clinicians attending with a reduced registration charge (between 0 and 10% of internationals) as well as support channelled into chosen areas such as provision of medical and educational equipment, increased workshop options and travel and accommodation subsidies. The effect of this model over the last four international conferences has been the involvement and support of over 400 local and regional clinicians. The collaboration engendered by the process has resulted in some truly amazing ongoing interactions between clinicians from around the globe.

Read more about our last conference and its effects in Sri Lanka here.

This year DevelopingEM comes to one of the hubs of the Pacific: Fiji.

Apart from being a tropical paradise and a major population hub of the Pacific, Fiji has long been a centre point for the region in terms of healthcare education with the Fiji National University providing Medical, Nursing and Allied Healthcare education since 1885.

Emergency Medicine in Fiji is a rapidly evolving specialty with a core group of recently graduated specialists motivated to push the field forward. In short, Fiji is the perfect place for DevelopingEM with its evolving EM faculty and existing connections to the wider Pacific region.

The Pacific Community (SPC), recognises the role of emergency medicine in achieving the advancement of Pacific peoples and has enthusiastically partnered with us to promote the conference and support the attendance of delegates from Fiji and the region.

In total we have approximately 40 delegates attending from Fiji and 12 from regional nations. A further two regional delegates will be supported by the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine (ACEM) Foundation. The regional nations represented in this support include Papua New Guinea, Timor Leste, The Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Tonga, Kiribati, Western Samoa, Tuvalu and the Cook Islands. Our Fijian organising committee have elected to collect a small registration fee which will be held and refunded after the conference in the form of medical or educational material. Each Fijian delegate also received a travel and accommodation stipend of 100 AUD per day to assist with the costs of getting to and from the conference. Our supported regional delegates will have their registration and flight costs completely covered. They will receive the same accommodation stipend as their Fijian colleagues.

In this endeavour we are honoured to be assisted by SPC and ACEM, without whom we would not be able to have as broad an impact.

Bringing people together from around the world has, over the years, had some unanticipated  yet amazing ongoing outcomes and we hope that apart from the educational opportunities of the conference itself that there will be broader effects across the Pacific from the event.

We hope you can all get involved with DevelopingEM in one way or another and look forward to seeing you in Fiji.

Bula Vinaka Vakalevu

Lee, Mark and Sanj

DevelopingEM