The World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine (WADEM) is a multidisciplinary professional association whose mission is the global improvement of prehospital and emergency health care, public health, and disaster health and preparedness. At their 2017 Congress in Toronto last week, Professor Tony Redmond officially became President of the organisation.

WADEM is a member-based professional association. Each individual member pays annual membership dues. The amount of the annual dues is based on the member’s annual income. The members elect the Board of Directors prior to the biennial Congress on Disaster and Emergency Medicine through an online election. Board members serve for two-year terms, with a maximum of four terms. The Board of Directors, in turn, elects the Officers (President, Vice Presidents (3), Chief Financial Officer, Secretary, President-Elect, and the Editor-in-Chief of Prehospital and Disaster Medicine). The next WADEM Congress will take place in 2019 in Australia’s third-largest city of Brisbane.

Professor Tony Redmond OBE

Professor Redmond said: “I am honoured to have been elected as president of The World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine (WADEM) which was established in 1977 to promote global academic excellence, research and teaching into  prehospital, emergency and disaster response and preparedness. During my term of office I will use the global academic platform that WADEM provides to emphasise that there is an ethical requirement for all of of us who respond to disasters and major emergencies to ensure that what we do is evidence based, open to scientific scrutiny and framed in such a way as to reduce the vulnerability and increase the capacity of the affected communities. Any help is not always better then no help, especially when delivering medical care, but altruism blended into skilled preparation and training can go a long way to ease the suffering of those most in need. Our efforts to continually improve the response must also be matched by working across countries and communities to increase local and national response capacity, which WADEM strives to do through its congresses, publications and membership.”

For more information about WADEM, visit their website.

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