The 4th Sungai Buloh Prehospital Care Conference – Expect the Unexpected

Prehospital Care Services in Malaysia is a field of emergency medicine that has its own challenges especially for the responders who care for the patients in the prehospital environment. Responders are expected to be able to handle a variety of case types and while still adhering to safe practices. They must be able to perform a scene assessment of the prehospital environment, initial assessment of the patient, manage the life threatening emergencies with appropriate initial steps, package and transport the patient with proper monitoring during the transfer of the patient, while maintaining good communication with their medical base. The Sungai Buloh Prehospital Care Conference was conducted since 2014 with the aims of advancing the responders knowledge, confidence and skill with regards to these challenges. This year was the 4th edition of the conference and it was organized in collaboration with the Faculty of Medicine UiTM and the College of Emergency Physicians.

Main Conference

This year’s conference focused on topics such as paediatric prehospital care, trauma care, ultrasound in the prehospital environment, obstetric emergencies, wilderness medicine, air retrieval medicine and toxicology. There were 2 preconference workshops held in conjunction with the main conference. The first was a Basic Paediatric Prehospital Care course, the first of its kind held in Malaysia. The instructors were from the Paediatric Emergency Physicians group as well as the SIG Prehospital Care Emergency Physicians. It was a 2-day workshop targeting medical officers and paramedics who found managing paediatric patients in the prehospital care environment to be challenging. The workshop focused on skills such as the paediatric assessment triangle, trauma and medical emergencies as well as out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.

Furthermore, the second workshop was a High Performance CPR workshop. The instructors were Emergency Physicians who taught the participants that were paramedics, medical officers from KKM as well as first responders from the private sector. The workshop focused on educating trainers to assess performance with recording CPR metrics and using CPR feedback devices, effective team dynamics using the pit crew approach and achieving a high CPR compression fraction.

The main conference composed of lectures given by Consultant Emergency Physicians and a Paediatric Emergency Physician with the purpose of educating the participants with new knowledge and approaches to patient care in the prehospital care setting. The participants were divided into two groups for the afternoon session; whereby the paramedics and first responders attended a knowledge sharing session by invited speakers who were senior paramedics, with topics ranging from disaster management, safety and key performance indexes. The medical officers and prehospital care supervisors attended a PHC medical directors’ workshop, where they were exposed to protocol development, assessment of competency of disaster management responders and a Q&A forum on key performance indexes in prehospital care.

Pre Conference Workshop

The organizers would like to thank all the invited speakers, instructors and participants who attended the conference. Feedback on suggestions for improvement and possible topics of focus for the future edition of the conference are welcomed.