Air Ambulance and Pre-hospital Care Day tackles key topics in trauma medicine

The eighth London Trauma Conference took place at the Royal Geographical Society, Kensington Gore, between 9 December and 12 December 2014. In a similar vein to previous years, a main programme of presentations was supplemented by breakaway sessions held parallel to the main conference. Speakers addressed a number of topical questions in trauma and emergency medicine. This year, conference organisers decided to run the concurrent London Cardiac Arrest Symposium over two days rather than the usual one, and an advanced paramedic masterclass was introduced covering areas such as analgesia, education, governance, plus a variety of clinical topics. The Journal of Paramedic Practice attended the Air Ambulance and Pre-hospital Care Day held on 11 December, which focused on trauma issues directly relevant to professionals working in the pre-hospital setting.

Proceedings began with Prof Wolfgang Voelckel outlining challenges to pre-hospital critical care. Voelckel argued that the ‘golden hour’ of emergency medicine has little scientific basis, and that rather than the traditional trimodal distribution of death that is often referred to in advanced trauma life support, there is a mono-modal peak of mortality in trauma in the first hour from time of injury.