Dealing with emergencies in rural areas of Europe: proceedings from WONCA Europe 2000

On 4 July 2000, two workshops on handling emergencies in rural areas of Eur ope were held at the WONCA (World Organisation of National Colleges and Aca demies of Family Medicine/General Practice) conference in Vienna under the auspices of EURIPA (European Rural and Isolated Practitioners' Association) . Papers submitted covered varying patterns of service provision and exampl es of short intensive training for emergencies at resident and general prac titioner levels. Ways of collecting data routinely for accident prevention were also discussed. The workshops concluded that there was a need for more research in the application of emergency skills, that lack of confidence i n dealing with emergencies may contribute to recruitment problems, and that further work towards a document detailing training requirements for emerge ncies was needed. This will be developed at a EURIPA workshop at WONCA in T ampere, June 2001.