FACEM named as recipient of 2023 IFEM Humanitarian Award

As a third-year junior doctor, Dr Georgina Phillips wasn’t planning on becoming an emergency clinician. But, looking at the Overseas Service Bureau (OSB) form for a two-year placement abroad, she knew that she needed to choose the emergency medicine placement over surgery, even if she wasn’t especially excited by it.

“I wasn’t very drawn to it - I was terrified in emergency departments as an intern,” she laughs now when thinking about her placement in Kiribati.

“Even though I knew I might want to be a surgeon, I knew I couldn’t impersonate a surgeon because I was just a junior doctor, so I thought I better do the emergency department job.”

Dr Phillips had always wanted to experience medicine outside of a Western context, and the OSB (now known as Australian Volunteers International) equitably matched the skills of applicants to work in countries across Africa, South America, South East Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific.

““As a volunteer, you were on exactly the same wage and conditions as the local staff, which set a tone of equality which I definitely preferred.””

“I was also motivated probably by some altruistic sense of justice and a desire to try to do good work in the world. The OSB model was very appealing, as it meant you were employed by, and answerable to your local colleagues,” Dr Phillips explains.

“As a volunteer, you were on exactly the same wage and conditions as the local staff, which set a tone of equality which I definitely preferred.”

As for Kiribati? While Dr Phillips’ time working in the small Pacific Island nation would the shape the next 20 plus years of her career, the option of volunteering there emerged serendipitously.

“I honestly was expecting to be sent to Africa but when my partner and I were told there were positions for the two of us in Kiribati, our first reaction was, 'Where is that?!' So perhaps it would be more correct to say that the Pacific, more specifically, Kiribati, chose me!”

It was an unlikely introduction to emergency medicine, but more than two decades later, Dr Phillips, a FACEM, long-time member and Former Chair of ACEM’s Global Emergency Care Committee (GECCo), has been recognised for her contribution to emergency medicine in the form of the 2023 International Federation for Emergency Medicine (IFEM) Humanitarian Award.

The third FACEM in three years to receive the IFEM honour – Dr Rosanne Skalicky and Dr Gerard O’Reilly received the award in 2021 and 2022, respectively, while Dr Chris Curry also received the award in 2018 – Dr Phillips sees the award as a cumulative recognition of her and the College’s efforts to advocate for emergency medicine globally.

Dr Phillips examining in Myanmar with Professor Aye Thiri Naing in 2017.

“It’s a very incredible and unexpected honour,” she says.

“I feel like I’m part of a big team of really wonderful colleagues who’ve all contributed to this elevation of global emergency care, within our College and with IFEM, but also coming from our region – The Pacific and South East Asia.”

Dr Phillips – an emergency clinician at Melbourne’s St Vincent Hospital, a PhD candidate at Monash University and co-editor of the Global Emergency Care section of the Emergency Medicine Australasia Journal – quickly appreciated the depth of knowledge and skill required to deliver emergency care once she arrived in Kiribati.

“You had to be all things for all people, and it meant you had to have skills that could be useful for everybody,” she reflects. “I was using my brain every day… I realised that I could be useful by developing the skills of an emergency medicine specialist.

“It changed my whole life, changed my career trajectory and obviously gave me a very deep connection and love for the Pacific, and for the type of work I’m still doing.”

““It changed my whole life, changed my career trajectory and obviously gave me a very deep connection and love for the Pacific, and for the type of work I’m still doing.” ”

After her two years in Kiribati, Dr Phillips returned to Australia to complete the study and examination process required to become a FACEM. Afterwards, she quickly recommenced her engagements with the Pacific, working, teaching and eventually examining across regions such as the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea (PNG), Fiji, Timor-Leste and Myanmar.

She remains a member of the Board of the Primary Trauma Care Foundation, which provides trauma training across the Pacific, and during her time with GECCo was a key player in pushing the College to recognise overseas work placement as an accredited mode of emergency specialist training.

Given so much of her work has involved education, capacity building, peer support and shared advocacy, Dr Phillips is especially humbled seeing local clinicians in the Pacific she helped train and mentor now lead and build their own innovative and effective spaces for emergency care.

“I just think about the Solomon Islands as an example,” she says. “When I first visited that place, the ED was just fledgling, and there were no specialists there.”

“I met Dr Trina Sale, who is now the Director of the ED, as a junior doctor. To follow her progress, to be able to support her and to now be totally inspired by her visionary, wonderful leadership – it’s humbling, rewarding and wonderful.”

She observes the journey of going from being a mentor and teacher to a learner is something that continues to excite her as she continues to identify new avenues to assist in the delivery of emergency care abroad.

Dr Phillips pictured earlier this year with local emergency physicians Drs Glenda Kore and Mangu Kendino in Papua New Guinea.

“It’s that great reciprocity of having perhaps started with doing some teaching and being the teacher, and then now, being the learner, back from watching wonderful colleagues in action, thinking, ‘Wow, I’ve never thought to do it that way, but that’s amazing what you’re doing there.’”

To this end, Dr Phillips hopes to use the skills acquired from her ongoing PhD research to help mentor, develop and champion the research voice and achievement of her peers in the Pacific.

“In the end, publications and peer reviewed journals are mediums that are recognised and respected globally,” she explains.

“The representation from the Pacific has been tiny from low- and middle-income countries. Their voice in research is under-represented, yet they are doing so many great things.

“I really want to explore important questions of emergency care and elevate the ability of colleagues to talk about their work, particularly the intersection of emergency care and equity.”

(Header Image: Dr Phillips pictured alongside Dr Trina Sale while working in an ED in the Solomon Islands, 2016. All images in the story are supplied courtesy of Dr Phillips.)