Maximising the efficiency of a team and utilising the best aspects of the non-leadership team members (followers) is what FACEM Dr Ian Summers will discuss as a keynote speaker at The Emergency SA (EMSA) Conference in August.
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To be held 3-4 August at the Adelaide Convention Centre, the conference is the shared vision of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine (ACEM), the College of Emergency Nursing Australasia (CENA) and Paramedics Australasia (PA).
To download the program, find our more information and register, visit the event website.
The importance of Followship
Dr Summers is an emergency physician and simulation educator at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne. He has worked in Australia and the UK in the emergency department, retrieval and pre-hospital environments. He has a passion for inter-professional and inter-tribal team and airway training.
Dr Summers will look at the role of followers in resuscitation teams and beyond this to the role they play in organisations and sport. “This includes how they can ‘step up’, support a leader and driving better patient outcomes, better organisational outcomes and gain satisfaction from the performance of the team,” Dr Summers says.
“It’s important because leadership is so often the focus both of simulation and clinical debriefing – which is my main interest – and of business communication as well. So the role of the follower seems to be unrecognised but probably just as important as the role of the leader.
“In fact, there is a strong interplay between the two roles, and the culture and style of one shapes the performance of the other role.”
Dr Summers will provide examples of how to both be an effective follower and how to lead in a style that allows for followers to increase the effectiveness of a team.
“This issue seems to be a considerably under recognised section of clinical behaviours both in literature and official courses like MBAs,” Dr Summers says.
And what can leaders learn from followers? “I think probably it is not so much what they can learn, it is what support effective followers can give to a leader,” Dr Summers says. “Both in terms of practical tasks, cognitive load and error management.”
Exchange of ideas
Dr Summers says he is looking forward to the conference as it a chance to “exchange ideas, allow for future collaborations and to also challenge, inspire, and pass on knowledge”.
“In some ways it is to pass on wisdom,” he says. “I think some of these events go beyond knowledge. A lot of what I teach is about the mistakes that I have made and what I have learnt from them.”
And with Dr Summers having met and worked with fellow keynote speakers FACEM Dr Natalie May, emergency nurse educator Jesse Spurr and critical care paramedic Gary Berkowitz, “means we’ve got the chance to provide a different chemistry and interaction with each other, and provide something different for delegates”.
Training the next generation
Dr Summers says his love for emergency medicine comes down to the team interaction “and training the next generation of both emergency physicians and educators”.
“There seems to be a sort of evolution in your career,” Dr Summers says. “Initially you find great satisfaction from patient care and as you grow that is joined with satisfaction from developing systems, developing teams, or capacity building of the young consultants or registrars in your department. Coupled with that is eventually forming the relationships between departments.”
The power of social media
Dr Summers, who is active on twitter and Instagram, said social media enables a new level of global relationships with peers and chances to work together. “It is astonishing to me that I can be attending a conference in rural South Africa, and run workshop sessions with key educators from England, South Africa, Denmark and Australia, or in Yellowstone National Park with some of my airway heroes,” he said. “None of that would be possible without relationships built on social media.”
You can find Dr Summers on twitter @IanMeducator and Instagram @summphotos.