Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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Global emergency medicine (EM) is a rapidly growing field within EM, as evidenced by the increasing number of medical students desiring global health and emergency care experiences. Despite this growing popularity, little is known of the effect of undergraduate medical education in global health on learners and patients in the United States and abroad. During the 2013 Academic Emergency Medicine consensus conference, a group of leading medical school educators convened to generate a research agenda on priority questions to be answered in this arena. This consensus-based research agenda is presented in this article.
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Prehospital care constitutes an important link in the continuum of emergency care and confers a survival benefit to injured and ill persons. As development of acute and emergency care in sub-Saharan Africa expands, there is a strong need to improve the delivery of prehospital care to help relieve the overwhelming regional morbidity and mortality attributable to time-sensitive, life-threatening conditions. Effective research is integral to prehospital care development, as it helps quantify the need for prehospital care and tests effective solutions. ⋯ Region-specific obstacles hindering prehospital research include the lack of epidemiologic data on emergency conditions, the underdevelopment of in-hospital emergency care, confusing prehospital terminology, poorly defined prehospital research priorities, the lack of qualified local prehospital researchers, and a poor understanding of local prehospital care systems. Solutions are offered to overcome each challenge by building on previous recommendations, by proposing new guiding principles, and by identifying areas where further consensus-building is needed. These guiding principles and suggestions are designed to steer discussions and output from future global health meetings targeted at improving prehospital research and development in sub-Saharan Africa.
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The theme of the 14th annual Academic Emergency Medicine consensus conference was "Global Health and Emergency Care: A Research Agenda." The goal of the conference was to create a robust and measurable research agenda for evaluating emergency health care delivery systems. The concept of health systems includes the organizations, institutions, and resources whose primary purpose is to promote, restore, and/or maintain health. ⋯ This was accomplished through discussion surrounding four principal questions touching upon the interplay between health systems and acute and emergency care. This research agenda is intended to assist countries that are in the early stages of integrating emergency services into their health systems and are looking for guidance to maximize their development and health systems planning efforts.