ESEM Overview
Emirates Society of Emergency Medicine (ESEM) is one of the specialized societies of the Emirates Medical Association (EMA) a non-profit organization established by the Ministry Social Affairs – Ministerial Decree No. (24) In the year 1980. ESEM was established in Aug 28 2012 by a group of Emergency Physicians who sensed the need to unite the specialty under one umbrella with the vision to be the vanguard of Emergency Medicine in the UAE and the region.
As the specialty of Emergency Medicine grows in the region and in UAE specifically, ESEM comes in to strengthen the knowledge and relationship amongst all emergency medical care providers, physicians; nurses; paramedics or residents.
Emergency Medicine in the UAE is heading toward a promising future. Since the foundation of ESEM, the EM community has come together to support a series of very successful milestones in the development of EM. ESEM aims to have an impact on the way EM is delivered in the country and regionally. We believe that this can happen in a Top-Down AND Bottom-Up approach. We need to educate our practitioners about things they need to change within their own local communities (up-to-date knowledge and clinical skills, administration and flow issues, and research etc). The other side is the “bigger picture” which is very important to tackle at a society level, although it may NOT be very exciting to many practitioners (they feel it’s too big for them). We plan to address the later through inviting policy makers to activities (involving key people from the Ministry of Health, Health Authorities, and other relevant entities) to address the “system” level issues and hope to get out of these activities with considerable achievements, if possible.
With the unique development the UAE is experiencing, EM is also getting an important attention from the government and ESEM is working on utilizing this attention to boost this field and structure a state-of-the-art emergency medical care in UAE.
Furthermore, ESEM plans to be the “Hub” for high quality EM education regionally. We hope to offer cutting-edge, innovative, and practice/policy-changing activities. Therefore we carefully select our scientific activities and plan to make ESEM annual conference (started in 2014) a “Brand” that people regionally and internationally have it high up in their list. ESEM 2014 was a huge success and we are planning to build on that.
ESEM Achievements
Since establishment, ESEM was able to out achieve its goals set by the board of directors in their first board meeting Sep 2012. Some of the most important ESEM achievements were:
1. Increasing membership from 28 to 500+ members
2. Establishing focused Sub committees
3. Launching a comprehensive Newsletter issues
4. Several successful Symposiums across the country
5. Several outreach courses in rural areas
6. Hosting internationally recognized conferences like the EM conference at Abu Dhabi Medical Congress, the Asia Pacific Association of Medical Toxicology 12th International Scientific Congress, ESEM Toxicology Simulation Course, Emergency Cardiology & Critical Care Course, and the Research Fundamental Course, the IFEM Trauma Update Symposium 2015 to mention few.
7. Board exam review course
8. Building a strong reputation and success for the ESEM annual Scientific Conference (first edition was in 2014)
9. Launching a well-visited website with few thousands visits so far
10. Launching active social media accounts (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook)
11. International Collaboration with regional and International partners like the International Federation of Emergency Medicine (IFEM) and several other organizations.
12. Successfully coordinating national efforts to introduce an equivalence of a “Good Samaritan Law”, which made the UAE the first Arab country to have such a law.
13. Successfully coordinating regional efforts to establish the Gulf Federation of Emergency Medicine.
14. Winning the bid to host the International Conference for Emergency Medicine (ICEM21) as the first time to be hosted in the Middle East.
15. Winning the bid to host the Asian Conference for Emergency Medicine (ACEM25) as the first time to be hosted in the GCC region.
With such a good record of achievements, ESEM continues to lead the regional EM activities, which made us considered regionally as one of the “most active EM society”. This was also recognized by the Emirates Medical Association in an Arabic letter sent to the ESEM Board of Directors recognizing their efforts as one of the active societies among all other societies in different specialties within the UAE.