Mercy Air co-hosts Southern California Emergency Care Conference

Mercy Air ambulance and medical provider partners, including Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego (RCHSD) and UC San Diego (UCSD) Health System, hosted the annual Southern California Emergency Care Conference on 14 September in San Diego. The conference is unique to Southern California as it brings together physicians, registered nurses, paramedics, first responders, and other critical care specialties in the prehospital, interhospital (transport), and hospital settings.

“When the conference first started, we were filling a need in the Southern California industry with critical care training,” said Mercy Air Area Manager Bill Hinton, who helped put together the conference 11 years ago. “This conference helps participants collaborate, ensures providers stay up to date on their reoccurring clinical training, and creates a lot of muscle memory so when the call to action is real, they are ready to provide the highest level of care.”

The need to stay sharp in critical care skills was reinforced in the keynote session, A Miracle in Motion, by Mercy Air Flight Nurse Amy Marquez and UCSD Emergency Medicine Resident Zac Fica who both helped save the life of a young patient who was in critical condition following a bike accident puncturing a main artery to the liver.

This year’s hands-on learning labs focused on wilderness emergency medicine, led by UCSD, and neonatal resuscitation, led RCHSD. The pre-conference human cadaver lab, led by UCSD and Mercy Air, also helped make the event unique.

“There are not many human cadaver lab training opportunities in Southern California,” said Hinton. “While many clinicians are trained on lifesaving procedures, many providers will perform them infrequently in their clinical practice due to their invasive nature. This cadaver lab forum helps participants build on and maintain those critical care clinical skills.”

An air ambulance service in the UK recently ran a pre-hospital emergency care conference, which had topics that included research, fatigue, technical advances, and endovascular interventions.