INTERNATIONAL PREHOSPITAL CARE CONFERENCE

26th to 28th September 2008 - Birmingham

“THE TEAM IS THE THEME”

Thank you to all our delegates, speakers and exhibitors who contributed to make Conference 2008 such an enjoyable event.

Pictures soon - watch this space!

Menu

Membership of BASICS

Product Selection

Executive Council

Links

London Trauma Conference - 12th to 14th November 2008

For more information, click here Links

CONGRATULATIONS

We are pleased and proud to announce that our Chairman Dr David Zideman has been appointed Lieutenant, the Royal Victorian Order (LVO) in the Queen's Birthday Honours June 2008. Awards in the Royal Victorian Order are the absolute gift of Her Majesty the Queen and this is therefore a personal award recognising Dr Zideman's contribution. Dr Zideman is well known and internationally respected in the field of resuscitation and immediate medical care, as well as being an honorary physician to Her Majesty the Queen.

SMART@Scene

Safety Management And Rescue Techniques @ Scene
Brand New RTC & Extrication Course
Designed For Medical & Fire Service Personnel

Subject to there being sufficient interest, the course will be held in the Rutland area Spring 2009
 For more information, click here

What is BASICS?

Formed in 1977, BASICS is a registered charity which acts as the national co-ordinating body for both schemes and individuals providing Immediate Care throughout the United Kingdom.

Why is the Association needed?

Sadly, the need to call 999 for an ambulance continues and current figures show an increasing demand on this service. Accidents, illness and major incidents do happen!

Major Incidents

More recent events remind us that major incidents still happen. BASICS members continue to train for such eventualities.

London bombings and BASICS here.

Within our membership we have world leaders in the speciality who devote much of their time sharing information so that others can prepare for the worst case senario.

BASICS members thoughout the country provide voluntary major incident support to the existing emergency services. In some areas, BASICS Doctors provide support in the form of Medical Incident Officers (MIO), Forward Medical Officers, Primary Triage Officers and mobile medical teams.

The role of the MIO draws together many of their exsisting skills utilised during BASICS work, some are listed here:

• Planning and incident control
• Clinical decision making
• Multi-agency liasion
• Hospital based speciality liasion
• Chemical decomtamination

The main accepted models of training for major incidents in UK are: -

• Major Incident Medical Management and Support Course
• HAZIMMS - Special Incident Medical Management and Support Course

For more major incident related courses contact BASICS HQ.

Local Applications

The Ambulance service ambulance service provides a high standard and at times quite complex emergency care system but there are also many occasions when emergency care requires a mulit-agency response at a local level.

Another example of this mulit-agency response would be seen at an 'industrial accident' where for example a worker has become trapped in machinery. The ambulance service would work along side the fire service to assist in the rescue. In addition to this, the ambulance service could call an immediate care practitioner (BASICS Doctor) who could assist with more advanced analgesia (pain relief) and, if necessary, carry out any surgical procedure needed to extricate the patient.

BASICS is an association of highly trained immediate care practitioners who provide their services in support of the ambulance service. Their activity is not bound by this one area, immediate care practitioners can be found at

• large sporting events,
• major incidents,
• public rallie
• mass gathering events.

They can also be found around the country responding as individuals to specific requests from ambulance control centres.

Who are BASICS Immediate Care Practitioners

Immediate care practitioners can be drawn from the professions such as: Doctors, Registered Nurses, State Registered Paramedics and Military Medics (CMT 1)

Their level of skill and knowledge can be varied and is generally related to the scope of practice that the individual's profession advocates. A common ethos which drives all involved in immediate care is quite simply............ 'the relief of suffering'.

Working together

Certain pre-hospital emergency teams work together to enhance the treatment power that can be delivered to the scene i.e. Nurse/Doctor - Paramedic/Doctor and many now have integrated first responders.

With a diversity of pre-hospital activity within UK, BASICS offers individual practitioners and schemes a support and advice network that can not be found anywhere else.

The British Association for Immediate Care is the organisation that brings us all together - BASICS is:

An Operational Body - whose members deliver pre-hospital immediate medical care in a variety of situations.

A Training Body - that delivers courses in pre-hospital immediate medical care.

An Advisory Body - that can provide advice and guidance to members, other professional bodies and Government on issues related to immediate medical care, medical aspects of major incident management and mass gathering medicine .

A message from the chairman - Dr David Zideman

Modernisation and Reform

One of the hallmarks of healthcare in the 21st Century has been the need for modernisation and reform. I am therefore pleased to be able to report that BASICS has been reviewing its procedures and practice and that members will be seeing the results as they unfold over the coming months.

Constitution and Bylaws

Tony Kemp, together with Richard Steyn and our Chief Executive, have spent a great deal of time and effort reviewing the Constitution and Bylaws under which BASICS operates. The result has been the drafting of a new Constitution and Bylaws document that conforms to the requirements of the Charity Commission. It will also reflect the changing membership and role of our organisation in pre-hospital care.

The draft was presented to the Executive meeting in June and the final document, for approval and implementation, will be presented to the membership at the Annual General Meeting in October.

Communication

Communication is a major constituent of our organisation. Head Office has now had its computers upgraded to allow for more efficient electronic communication with our members. Andrew Thurgood and the BASICS office continue to develop the website which will more closely represent our organisation’s activities. The website will soon include a section which will encourage individual members and schemes to report on their activities and another section to develop the theme of clinical governance with subsections on clinical effectiveness, critical incident reporting (e.g. equipment failure) and accountability.

The BASICS executive is very aware that it does not have enough of a dialogue with its membership and we hope this will start to remedy the situation.

In an effort to improve communications with our professional colleagues and the general public, Brian Robertson has produced a new BASICS brochure. This brochure provides essential information about our organisation, its aims, objectives and structure. It is available from National Headquarters

I hope that you agree that BASICS is in the process of modernising and that you will support the reforms that will keep us in line with the pre-hospital world in the 21st Century.

David Zideman
Chairman
23-Jun-2004