Geriatric Emergency Medicine

Thank you to all our members and other interested folk that were able to attend the GEM SiG symposium and meeting in Oslo 2015 – it was great to see and hear from so many of you!

Our symposium started with Professor Abdel Bellou (EUSEM) giving two talks on older people in the Emergency Department, covering trauma and resuscitation. There was good interaction from the audience (mainly geriatricians), which is exactly the kind of approach we need to ensure that European GEM evolves in an integrated, iterative manner!

Dr Simon Conroy then gave an update on the GEM curriculum work which is progressing well and is entering its final validation phase with the UEMS section on geriatric medicine and emergency medicine in the last quarter of this year. Thank you to all who have contributed – your ideas on its implementation would be very welcome.

Our SiG meeting followed shortly after, charged with coffee! You stated that the issue you would like to see the SiG focus upon a range of issues:

• Frailty identification in urgent care – key points being validity (sensitivity & specificity) but also pragmatism (a screening tool that takes <1 minute to complete) – there is no gold standard at present, so an EU project is on the cards.
• Models of care – what intervention works best? Again no clear answers, but collaboration between ED and GER MED team key. It was suggested that we should undertake a mapping exercise to describe the models of care across Europe as a first step – please contact S.P.Mooijaart(at)lumc.nl for more information
• Teaching – in addition to the work on the curriculum, we will need to work on embedding the curriculum in your national GER MED and ED curriculums; there will also be a GEM academy, which we hope to establish in 2016 – if you are interested in getting involved, please get in touch
• Quality improvement projects – can we share your QI projects on this website?
• What are the outcomes? What outcome measures are important? Is it just service metrics, or should we be developing a Patient Related Outcome Measure?

If you want to get involved please just e-mail: spc3(at)le.ac.uk; also if you have given your name but not received e-mails form us recently, please contact me.