YOURS CORE Group Representative for South East Asia Dr Naren Nallapeta is a trained surgeon and a member of the International Federation of Medical Students’ Association (IMFSA), the biggest association of medication professionals around the world. He is also passionate about road safety and on the basis of this, attended the 63rd IMFSA General Assembly in Taiwan, Province of China, with the mission of sharing road safety.
Written by Dr. Naren Nallapeta, Coordinator of the South East Asia Region of the CORE Group.
It is of great pleasure to have attended the 63rd General Assembly of IFMSA this past week in Taipei, Taiwan, Province of China, where inspired delegates from more than 98 countries were there. The meeting was just wonderful with inspired youth from the medical fraternity were there to discuss the problems of the world. The theme for this General Assembly was ‘Sustainable Development for the New Era’ and externals from various organizations came in to discuss the issue with the delegates.
Naren delivering a session on road safety to the IMFSA during SCOPH sessions.
As a part of the same, I got a chance to represent YOURS and also brainstorm with various other medical students and youth regarding road safety and its impact in the world scenario. I got a session to facilitate in the SCOPH (Standing Committee of Public Health) Sessions on 7th morning.
The session began at 8:30 AM with more than 80 SCOPH participants who are active in public health issues in their respective countries. It was a very interactive and productive session with active participation from all the national representatives. The topic of discussion was ‘Scope of the Problem’!! Here the issue of road safety is a problem of the world was discussed and a fruitful discussion went on regarding the risk factors determining road traffic accidents, why is road traffic accidents the highest cause of mortality in the youth and so on.
All participants were given a chance to think and come up with the 5 main factors leading to road traffic accidents. The Decade of Road Safety and the pillars of the same were discussed too in depth. Special attention and discussion took place in the Post-trauma care and emergency medical services.
There was a great disparity in the arrival of emergency medical services in different countries where countries in the African region and the Asian Subcontinent had a diverse answer and did not have a concrete time within which the emergency services would reach the crash site.
Naren with a range of participants discussing all things health and road safety.
Most of the countries do not have a comprehensive emergency training in their undergraduate level in the area of post-trauma care, advanced life support and everyone felt that it must be made compulsory and a part of the medical curriculum worldwide.
Overall many solutions were discussed for this worldwide problem and the importance of care was spread to all. Take home message was for each of us to take a little more care in their lives as each and every one of us are at risk on roads in our daily lives and being a preventable cause of death must be more emphasized and care to be taken by people all around the world.
This update was provided by Dr Naren Nallapeta – Coordinator of the South East Asia Region at YOURS.