AAEM Scientific Assembly in San Francisco

March 18th, 2002.

Dr. Kumar Alagappan and Dr. Indrani Sheridan were registrants at the AAEM Scientific Assembly in San Francisco in March 2002. The conference was held over 3 days and was attended by several other AAEMI members, including Drs. Carol Barsky, Steve Bernstein and James Holliman. Apart from attending the conference lectures, we made great strides in getting INTEM 2002 publicized. Dr Alagappan gave a talk to the Board of Directors at their Annual General Meeting and obtained official AAEM endorsement for INTEM 2002. AAEM also promised to inform all their members electronically and will advertise the conference in future issues of their bi-monthly journal “Common Sense”.

Drs Alagappan and Sheridan participated in the International Section meeting, held on March 16th, and obtained enthusiastic support for INTEM 2002. AAEM was also very interested in supporting any similar ventures to promote Emergency Medicine internationally. There were multiple other projects, future meetings and conferences being discussed at the meeting. It was encouraging to have the benefit of their knowledge, vision and past experiences with holding conferences similar to INTEM.

At the meeting, issues were raised regarding promoting EM internationally, which would be relevant to what was currently being done in India. Some of these were, the possible creation of an additional AAEM membership category for non-US people who would benefit from recognition in their country by virtue of a title in EM; the creation of a database of physicians with international experience who are willing to act as advisors for AAEM members working on projects in any particular part of the world; certificates of recognition for people living in foreign countries and working to promote EM at their institutions, and much more.