The Chair's Autumn Update
September has hit most departments with a bang While we are all clinging on to the last vestiges of summer, attendances throughout the country have increased sharply. For the first time this Autumn, we will have a years' worth of paediatric specific attendance data at a national level in England. More work to do but great to have this visibility to support us all to advocate for our services and patients.
We are still on cloud nine after a fantastic APEM PERUKI conference. We loved bringing you a combination of PEM research mixed with translation into practice, guideline updates and discussions around system challenges, of course interspersed with some much-needed networking and socialising. You can relive some key highlights in our blog, written by our fantastic resident doctor reps APEM / Peruki Conference highlights Sept 2026
Congratulations to our prize winners!
We gave the first APEM PERUKI recognition award for Outstanding Contribution to Paediatric Emergency Medicine to the amazing Prof Ian Maconochie. A founding member of APEM and the first Professor of Practice of Paediatric Emergency Medicine in the UK, you can read his nomination here. Moving forward, the APEM and PERUKI executive committees will invite nominations for the Ian Maconochie Award for Outstanding Contribution to Paediatric Emergency Medicine from our members - watch this space!
The Elizabeth Molyneux prize winner was awarded to Dr Clare Wilson for her work with the PERFORM data highlighting that in children with fever, a higher nPEWS at triage correlates with a clinical course consistent with severe disease
The best poster prize was awarded to Dr Jacinta Bloomfield et al on the suitability of ED nPEWS and its correlation with Manchester Triage Score.
We held our AGM at the conference and you can catch up on the latest APEM activity through on our AGM page. Most notably, a quorate of our membership supported the exec committee in moving forward with constitutional changes. We will keep you updated of changes in the coming months.
And finally, we heard from David James about the Healthier Together platform at the conference, ICBs have a varying uptake of the platform even though used widely by clinicians, which has led to some access challenges for us all. Some good news! The Healthier Together team have secured some (time limited) funding to help ICBs onboard onto the platform and this should have been cascaded to CYP regional leads. Please link with your local systems to ensure this is utilised! APEM knows its members value this platform so we are linking with HT to see how we can advocate for ongoing implementation and spread across the four nations.
We will announce our next event soon but expect to hear about our pre-conference workshop at RCEM's annual conference, our usual presence at RCPCH in May and announcements for APEM PERUKI 2027
We have re-launched our social media presence - you can find us on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn - please follow us if you use these platforms.
Best wishes to All
Charlotte Clements and the APEM Team
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