SIG on Emergency Medicine Annual Report

Victor Ng, convenor of the WONCA Special Interest Group (SIG) on Emergency Medicine provides his annual report for 2016-17

The WONCA Special Interest Group (SIG) on Emergency Medicine is one of the newest SIGs within the WONCA World family. It was launched in November 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in conjunction with the WONCA world conference.

Emergency medicine and urgent care has been recognized as a key domain of care within family medicine. In many countries such as Nepal and Canada, family doctors participate strongly in delivering emergency care. Globally, this is particularly apparent in rural and remote health systems. The main objectives of the SIG includes the creation of workshops and continuing professional development opportunities for family doctors who are practice in the domain of emergency medicine. In addition, we collaborate strongly with other WONCA working parties and special interest groups such as the SIG Disaster and Catastrophe Medicine to assist and advise the WONCA executive on matters relating to emergency medicine.

Despite being a young SIG, our group has engaged participants in all WONCA regions with involvement from several WONCA young doctor movements. Workshops have been planned for WONCA regional conferences including WONCA Europe in Prague and WONCA Asia Pacific in Pattaya City.

We continue to recruit and welcome new enthusiastic members from all WONCA regions and work together to strengthen the discipline of Family Medicine.