2023 Conferences

The College was finally able to deliver a full suite of conferences in 2022, following on from a challenging period due to the pandemic hitting right at the time our merger was finalised and the College in the current form began operations.

At the time of the merger, the College had committed to maintaining the events offered by both PA and ANZCP previously, leaving us with five major events on the calendar. While this structure provided the opportunity for members to attend varied events at different times of the year, it was logistically challenging to offer conferences at such frequency and without significant cost to the membership. Having reviewed the operations in 2022, we have sought feedback and held discussions on what the structure would look like in future years.

As a result, 2023 will see a new conference calendar, with two major events locked in, and some smaller events yet to be finalised to ensure we reach our membership in a more local way.

Critical Care Summit 2023

A new event on the College calendar, the Critical Care Summit 2023 will be held on 25 and 26 May at Tweed Heads. This event will replace the previously long-standing Trauma on the Border. It will absorb the trauma-focused content while expanding the focus and creating an environment which is inclusive of all clinicians who are involved in complex patient care, and who require an understanding of complex patient physiology. It is designed to be welcoming to all clinicians with an interest in working in the critical care space, even if you are not there yet. The College is seeking the support and involvement of the Australasian College of Emergency Medicine and the College of Emergency Nurses Australia to encourage inter-professional collaboration and multi-disciplinary approaches to complex patient care. Keep an eye out for more details for this exciting event in your inbox and on the College website over the coming weeks.

Critical Care Summit will run every second year. In the alternate year (so running for the first time in 2024), the College will hold a primary-care focused conference, which will absorb the content from our Rural Outback and Remote (ROAR) Conference, but again expanding the focus to include more aspects of primary care, community paramedicine and the rural/remote setting.

ACP International Conference 2023

What a wonderful event ACPIC was in Brisbane last year, bringing people back together for a fully-featured conference for the first time since the pandemic began. Our feedback during and after the event was overwhelmingly positive around the levels of engagement and the difference being in the same room with colleagues makes. 2023 will see us run ACPIC again in September, this time in Melbourne from 13 to 15 September. We are looking forward to making this event bigger and better than ever, and expect some great celebrations as it lands in the year of the College’s 50th anniversary. You can pre-register your interest for both ACPIC and the Critical Care Summit on the College website now: https://paramedics.org/events

Research Symposium

The Research Symposium will take a break in 2023, as we build a strong research stream into ACPIC. We acknowledge the collegiate environment and supportive atmosphere that the Research Symposium afforded novice researchers and those immersed in the field. We found this year, though, that our events were effectively competing with each other, and we would love the opportunity to provide researchers with a great platform to deliver their presentations, so we will be aiming to do this at ACPIC this year and seek feedback from all those involved along the way including attendees, presenters and the organising committees. An enormous thanks must go to the College’s Research Committee who delivered a sensational Research Symposium in July 2022.

Other events

We are still planning for some more locally accessible, single-day events in our jurisdictions including New Zealand. Our Education Team, Education Committee and our dedicated Member Committees continue to work hard on delivering local CPD events, webinars and podcasts and we thank them profusely for their wonderful work throughout 2022.

I look forward to a very exciting year in 2023, with new events, our 50th Anniversary and some wonderful advocacy work being done by the College.

Lauren Daws Chief Operating Officer