RickInOz

Not quite on the scale of the Inaugural Presidential speech, but still fairly daunting.

Today it was the turn of MedSTAR to present to the weekly Retrieval community teleconference. There are a number of organisations similar to ours around Australia including CareFlight and Adult Retrievals Victoria. Since these services are based primarily in state capitals, and are few in number, the great Australian phenomenon of “The Tyranny of Distance“. This makes it difficult to get the small number of specialist together in any one place at the same time.

Fortunately technology comes to the rescue and we conduct shared teaching sessions remotely. The slant of these sessions is to discuss or impart issues that are specific to retrieval medicine, and the unique clinical, technical and logistical considerations. Along with 3 of my colleagues, we presented case reports as a springboard for deeper discussion. Our topics included “Chest Drains“, “Rationale for Retrieval“, “To intubate or not to intubate” and “Stay’n'Play vs Load’n'Go“.

Like many of my colleagues, I have presented to many meetings and teaching sessions, but always thus far to people in the same room. It was a strange experience not being able to see the majority of the audience. Even stranger then to have questions fired at you from a phone rather than being able to see your challenger. Overall I think our subject matter and points for discussion went down well and it certainly generated a fair amount of debate.

So this will be yet another thing to put on my CV – presentation to a multi-agency, interstate aeromedical education forum. For relatively little effort, this sounds fairly impressive. Every little helps.