Sam Beattie | Nurse Practitioner | ACEM Foundation Committee Member
About Sam Beattie
Sam Beattie is a proud Ngunnawal woman, Nurse Practitioner, and Credentialled Diabetes Educator working across rural Lutruwita (Tasmania) in Urgent Care and Aboriginal Controlled Health. She brings over 20 years of nursing experience to her work, with a strong focus on culturally safe care, systems reform, and community empowerment. Sam is a community representative on the ACEM Foundation Committee and the Indigenous Health Committee, and co-chairs ACEM’s Reconciliation Action Plan Steering Group. Her work is grounded in Community accountability, truth-telling and is guided by her deep commitment to improving emergency care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Sam was recently sponsored by an ACEM Foundation Committee after being invited to speak at the International Conference on Emergency Medicine (ICEM) 2025 in Montréal, Canada.
Standing on stage at ICEM in Montreal, I felt the weight and privilege of carrying community voices into a global space. I was part of the ICEM’s first entirely Indigenous heath focused session held in the Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility (EDIA) stream - a gathering that brought together leaders in emergency medicine from across continents to speak not just about what we treat, but how we care, who we see, and who too often go unseen.
I joined the panel, Community Empowerment and Strength-Based Approaches in Emergency Care, facilitated by Dr Lai Heng Foong (Australia, FACEM) and Gabrielle Ebsworth (Australia, ACEM) alongside Dr Sheila Peters (Canada), Dr Mulinda Nyirenda (Malawi, AFEM), Dr Pauline Convocar (Philippines, IFEM), and Di Te Tau (Aotearoa, ACEM). Together, we explored how systemic inequities and colonial legacies shape emergency care, and how we are working, each in our own context, to dismantle harm and build culturally anchored, community-led solutions.
My presentation, “BlaK Wounds, White Stitches,” drew on the lived experiences of Aboriginal and Torress Strait Islander People captured through ACEM’s Traumatology Talks Report. I spoke about what it means for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to enter emergency departments carrying not only illness, but also inherited trauma, cultural erasure, and mistrust. I described how this plays out in practice, through under-triage, extended wait times, stereotyping, and unsafe discharge. I also shared how cultural safety, when grounded in truth-telling and Indigenous governance, becomes a clinical tool for healing, not just a policy statement.
Presenting this work on an international stage was a moment of both professional growth and cultural accountability. I had meaningful conversations with global colleagues who saw reflections of their own communities in our lived experiences, particularly First Nations clinicians from Canada, Aotearoa, Asia, Africa and Australia. These connections have already begun to inform my ongoing work with the ACEM Indigenous Health Committee, RAP Steering Group, and Foundation Committee, and broadly in my continued contribution to ACEM.
Montréal itself deepened this experience. Held on the unceded territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation (Mohawk), traditionally known as Tiohtià:ke, the city holds a powerful legacy of Indigenous resilience. While walking through the old town, I passed a construction site where archaeologists had recently discovered pottery dated at 500–1,000 years old and ancient arrowheads. They told me this was not an unusual find in the city. This was a visceral reminder that Indigenous presence is not a chapter of the past, rather it lives beneath our feet, layered into the land, continuously asserting itself in quiet, grounded ways.
I also connected to the Métis Nation’s presence in Montréal (descendants of early relationships between Indigenous women and French settlers), who continue to shape the cultural, artistic, and political life of the city. Their stories, like ours, speak to survival, complexity, and continuity.
As the session ended and the conference drew to a close, I was reminded that clinical excellence means little without equity; and that equity cannot exist without truth. Speaking on that stage in Montréal was not just about representation, but about reclamation: of voice, of space, of narrative.
Thanks to the generous support of the ACEM Foundation, I was able to bring these stories into global view and return home with a renewed sense of purpose. The relationships built and knowledge shared will continue to shape ACEM’s cultural safety agenda and strengthen the work we do across emergency medicine and community health.
Emergency medicine is global, but so too is the unfinished business of colonisation, and the shared responsibility to dismantle it. What we build next must be shaped by those who have survived the systems we seek to improve.
And that begins by listening to Country, to Community, and to each other.