Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and EMS Medical Director at Montgomery County Hospital District, Robert Dickson is set to engage delegates at the Victoria Annual Conference later this year.
Dr Dickson, who is based in Houston, Texas, will deliver two talks, one on stroke treatment and a further talk on preparing for disasters where he will recall his experience dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and The Santa FE School Mass Shooting in 2018.
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The ACEM Victoria Annual Conference will be held from Friday 19 – Sunday 21 October at the seaside RACV Inverloch Resort.
The program will include a broad range of local speakers and pre-conference workshops, along with an enticing social program.
Visit the website for further information, program details and to register.
Optimizing systems of care for stroke
Dr Dickson has a personal and invested interest in stroke treatment. His mother suffered a likely Large Vessel Occlusion (LVO) stroke in 2004 and was severely disabled. She ultimately passed away as a result of her disability.
At the meeting, Dr Dickson will discuss the management and treatment of stroke, centering on the awareness for clinicians of the relevant efficacy of endovascular stroke trials/extended time window. He will particularly highlight the urgent nature of this work and diagnosis for EMS/ED clinicians.
Dr Dickson is committed towards the advancement of patient care and treatment focusing on, “the time sensitive nature of reperfusion therapy,” he says, “As tissue and functional outcomes are directly related to how quickly these patients can be taken to endovascular intervention”.
“This therapy, as with any new therapy, comes with its own broad range of questions and challenges,” Dr Dickson observes.
“Concentrating on the benefits of bypassing non endovascular capable hospitals and taking patients direct to intervention, as well as the issues that arise from finding an optimal pre-hospital stroke scale to predict LVO, is what I will discuss.”
Above all, Dr Dickson will focus on discovering the best practice for emergency department evaluation and disposition of these patients. “There is no current clinical topic that is more important to our patients than developing robust systems of care for LVO stroke patients.”
Preparing for disaster – Hurricane Harvey
Dr Dickson not only uses his critical decision making prowess in a trauma setting in the emergency department, but has also been at the forefront of Houston disasters and has a unique perspective on how each type of disaster distinguishes itself.
Hurricane Harvey was the wettest tropical cyclone on record in the Unites States and Houston was hit the hardest.
Dr Dickson’s describes his experience as a first responder as both “amazing and unexpected”. The planning and preparation was immense for such a big operation. They set up an immediate emergency central organisational hub.
In any disaster scenario he has faced or been trained for, whether it be a typhoon, plane crash, or bombing, Dr Dickson breaks them all down into three separate parts, “the pre-planning, the disaster itself and the aftermath or recovery”.
“With the rain, the most difficult aspect became not only acute care, but access. Whole areas became inaccessible due to mounting floodwaters that just would not recede," Dr Dickson says. "We sent no one home for five days, so we had back up crews. The work became about prioritising emergencies, as we still had other trauma coming through like abdominal pain and cardiac arrest. Communication became key to managing the disaster.”
Santa Fe shooting
Dr Dickson was also present at the time of the Santa Fe shooting just a few months ago. He describes both disasters as having vastly different preplanning objectives.
The major difference being the length of the disaster itself. “For the most part these gunmen in mass shootings are rapidly neutralized,” he says, “in some ways these are very short violent episodes and the way that we approach those and the training is completely different.”
“The shooting violence, especially in this country, has gone up by staggering numbers. The demographics of these incidents are rapidly changing and no longer align with what we’re trained for.”