Dear colleagues, dear emergency positive friends,
Slovak Society of Disaster and Emergency Medicine was founded in 1996 and its first members were mostly anesthesiologists, intensivists, traumatologists, surgeons and physicians from burn injury treatment centres. So since the beginning the Society has been multidisciplinary. Many of them also work for Prehospital Emergency Medical Services. The primary goal of Society is non-institutional education of doctors and especially doctors of Emergency Medicine. The situation is difficult because in Slovak Republic there are no emergency departments according to international characteristics and so only few doctors work in the so called Central Admission Departments and most of them in pre-hospital part of emergency medicine. Slovakia is a country where in the last 20 years since the change of political orientation there were no larger mass disasters except car crash with tens of injured and floods with few hundreds of victims. Because of that Disaster Medicine awareness is missing in both specialized and lay community. Legislative about Integrated Rescue System, relief works and mass casualty incidents is mostly understood as a obligation implicit from the membership in European Union.
Small number of members (140) means that the same specialists are members of the Society, committee of specialized Society, pedagogues on high schools and universities, authors of articles in magazines, lectures on congresses, chief medical officers on EMS workstations, specialized representatives of EMS providers and at the same time full time physicians in pre-hospital emergency care. The advantage is interconnection between theory, praxis and education. Disadvantage is the lack of time for concept thinking and scientific work. Even though we are aware that our task is to educate not only our members but also the rest of specialized community, policemen, firemen, civil defense, army, humanitarian organizations, media and lay persons in the problematics of emergency medicine, in-hospital and pre-hospital and in disaster medicine.
We want to contribute on national and also international level in elaborating recommendations for emergency and critical patients treatment, algorithms in disaster medicine, personal and equipment standards and to unify pre gradual education of medical students. After our definitive acceptance to EuSEM we hope to multiply our influence on home ground. We are open to all suggestions, we would be glad to welcome in Slovak Republic specialists with interest in pre hospital emergency care, which is our biggest domain.
With regards
Viliam Dobias, President
and executive committee of Society