Pakistan Society of emergency Medicine has formed to provide a platform to all those doctors and nurses who work to provide care to patients in emergency department. This platform is needed to discuss and promote emergency medicine in a coordinated and combined fashion. Professional societies are an essential part of any specialty and, so rightfully PSEM helped Emergency Medicine in Pakistan at many levels.
The early Emergency Medicine providers created society of Emergency Physicians Pakistan in 2009. It created the basic understanding regarding Emergency Medicine and resulted in formation of the great teamwork. The people behind the creation of SEPP were the ground workers and are still working to improve the EM in Pakistan. The president of SEPP was Dr. Junaid Abdur Razzak along with vice president Dr. Seemin Jamali and General Secretary Dr. Shiraz Qayyum Afridi. From 2009 under the banner of SEPP besides building the team, we had few conferences and also helped various departments in their bid for EM training. The biggest success of SEPP was leading the efforts to establish Emergency Medicine training through College of Physician and Surgeons Pakistan. The SEPP got stalled for various reasons and a collective struggle became difficult under its banner.
With increased number of training programs need for the society grew and people started thinking about creating a similar platform again. In 2017 the struggle became more unified and foundation of PSEM was laid. Pakistan Society of Emergency Medicine (PSEM) was formed to be more inclusive and allowed nurses and paramedics to be part of the society. In 2017 the team applied for the registration of PSEM and after significant struggle the PSEM got registered to SECP (Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan).
After registration the election was held and following cabinet took office,
1. Abdus Salam Khan (President).
2. Emad ud din Siddiqui (Vice President).
3. Khawaja Junaid (Mustafa General Secretary).
4. Hamid Shahzad (Secretary Finance).
5. Ghazanfar Saleem (Social Secretary).
6. Mohammad Habib Khan (Publication Secretary).
Before even the PSEM had elections the work had started on the improvement of emergency medicine in Pakistan. We had activities like conference, a summit and then recently a virtual conference of international stature.
The membership increased to almost 200 members and increase in the interest of people to join the society was seen. PSEM became a member of international Federation of emergency medicine in 2020. This was due to hard work that the whole team carried out. PSEM has established its international faculty which actively participate in developing emergency medicine in Pakistan.
PSEM is entering the second phase and the election is due. New people will take the place of previous cabinet but we will continue the ongoing teamwork which will result in further positive change in the emergency medicine canvas in Pakistan.
The future could see further enhancement in the level of care and increase in the number of training departments and resultant improved understanding of all stakeholders. Our future plan have been collectively created and discussed in the summit held in 2019. In that summit we collectively came up with a roadmap for the future and it had four themes which included emergency care, system design, developing quality standards and leadership development.
We are hopeful that with the new tenure, the PSEM will develop strategies to increase number of training departments, improve the curriculum of EM to make it locally relevant, train the trainers and develop local leadership through educational activities and mentorship.
I hope all those who work in healthcare and care about competent emergency care would help us at PSEM to achieve our goal of improving emergency care in Pakistan through education development mentorship and collective wisdom. It is not just need of the time but also our professional responsibility.