About Us
Every year, you and more than 1100 other emergency medicine practitioners look after over 2 million patients in 108 emergency departments in BC. From urban to remote settings, you strive to provide the best care for your patients.
Imagine one emergency department with 108 rooms. Here, you’ll find your peers sharing knowledge and supporting one another with easily accessible information about best clinical care, new and better methods for delivering care, learning resources, and real-time communication.
The sole purpose of the BC Emergency Medicine Network is to support you; it connects BC emergency practitioners with each other and with current, practical resources via four core programs. And these programs – Clinical Resources, Innovation, Continuing Professional Development, and Real-Time Support – integrate this support under one roof. In this way, the Network connects academics, policy makers, administrators, managers, and patients with front-line clinicians. The Network brings us together to ask and answer questions, share and improve resources, and robustly discuss the issues we face, ideally commenting, criticizing and contributing!
Our Goals
- Provide real and sustainable system improvements to emergency care in all BC emergency departments
- Create a vibrant and robust network for emergency practitioners, policymakers, provincial and local emergency care leaders, researchers, quality care experts, educators, and patients
- Use expertise from across the province to effectively develop and share point-of-care clinical resources to support best practice and system solutions
- Evaluate the Network and its initiatives continuously to improve Network functions
- Promote development of more robust provincial emergency data
How We Support
Each of these programs and services is a means for you - practitioners from diverse emergency departments and experts outside for traditional academic spheres - to share your collective wisdom regarding emergency care. The activities of the BC Emergency Medicine Network are divided into four functional programs:
Clinical Resources
Access best practices and clinical support tools for core clinical questions, presented succinctly for use on shift, updated to reflect new knowledge, and tailored to meet the needs of tertiary, large community, rural, and remote emergency departments in BC.
Research & Innovation
Explore new knowledge that improves the practice of emergency medicine and leads to reduced burden of illness, system improvements for better patient care, and knowledge sharing to better inform practice everywhere BC.
Continuing Professional Development
Identify learning opportunities that will help you to acquire and maintain necessary emergency medicine skills through high-quality resources such as simulation courses, webinars, and rounds.
Real-Time Support
Communicate with your peers to share knowledge and support one another using mediums appropriate to your care situation’s urgency and complexity, including non-urgent secure social media-based support, urgent telephone advice, and video-linked critical care support.
How We Measure Success
Ongoing evaluation of the BC Emergency Medicine Network is essential to learning about what works, what doesn’t, and what you want, allowing us to course correct on a real-time basis.
Being clear about why we are measuring what is being measured, and how it is best measured… is critical, and ideally this work should be done when the network is first starting up. (Networks Leadership Summit VII, 2013)
During early development, we will evaluate the Network in terms of how successful it is in working towards its vision and mission; how frequently practitioners collaborate with each other and the nature of these collaborations; how well the Network is organized to help practitioners; how engaged Network members are; how well Network members are supported; and how the Network engages patients and impacts patient care. The evaluation will commence Fall, 2017, use mixed methods, and be conducted in three cycles at approximately six-month intervals. Feedback on findings will be solicited on the Network website at the conclusion of each cycle for data collection.
