Emergency Last Aid: When there is nothing more to do, there is always more to be.

A/Prof Matt Hooper¹

¹South Australia’s MedSTAR Emergency Medical Retrieval Service

Biography:

Matt is an intensive care specialist with a diverse background spanning emergency medicine, prehospital and retrieval medicine, and palliative care. He founded South Australia’s MedSTAR Emergency Medical Retrieval Service, co-authored a highly regarded case-based textbook, and has held senior teaching, academic and examining roles in prehospital and retrieval medicine, both nationally and internationally.

With a longstanding focus on high-performance teams working in high-acuity, high-consequence environments, Matt has in recent years turned towards palliative and end-of-life care — completing a Master’s degree at Cardiff University and working within the hospice setting. He is passionate about preventing avoidable suffering and improving end-of-life outcomes for patients in acute care. It is this combination of focus and broad experience that led him to establish Emergency Last Aid (ELA), the educational program he now directs and on which this keynote is based

Abstract:

Prehospital and Retrieval Medicine clinicians train to extend life. Yet there are moments — on a remote strip, a roadside, a small peripheral hospital, mid-flight, many hours from definitive care — when survival is no longer possible, and it can feel as though we have reached the limit of our clinical capacity. We all train to prevent death, but almost none of us are trained to respond to its arrival.

Emergency Last Aid (ELA) is an educational program that aims to fill this gap in our curriculum, arguing that the end of a resuscitation is not the end of care, but the start of a different and equally skilled task. For when there is nothing more to do, there is always more to be: honest, genuine and present for the dying and those who love them — those who remain. Crucially, this care extends beyond the patient — to the other emergency service responders and air crew alongside us, to the teams we lead, and to ourselves. Critical care medicine has taught us how to relentlessly fight for life; ELA teaches us how to be present at its end.

This keynote address will examine what ELA looks like in the prehospital and retrieval environment, and why it is a core competency rather than a soft skill. Because how we meet death as clinicians shapes how our patients, loved ones, bystanders, our teams and ourselves carry on afterwards.