The St.Emlyn’s Podcast

St Emlyn's covers emergency and trauma medicine from a UK vantage point, and it does so at the level of clinicians talking to clinicians. Ian Beardsall hosts. Simon Connolly joins him for the recurring round-up episodes that gather up recent blog posts, papers and themes from the preceding month or two. Those round-ups range widely: an RSI trial, training reform, trauma leadership, AI arriving on the shop floor. They also stray, deliberately, into subjects most clinical podcasts skirt. One episode sits with corridor care and refuses to file it under burnout or moral injury, describing instead a kind of acquired blindness that sets in when the same scene repeats without end, and calling on senior figures in their organisations to say plainly that it should stop. Other episodes are interviews, many captured at conferences. Trauma 2030 at the Royal College supplies a conversation with Rich Carden on shock, in which a hemorrhagic patient is followed along a timeline, damage control resuscitation applied, hemorrhage controlled, and the patient remains shocked for reasons that have shifted underneath the original diagnosis. Tissue ischemia, reperfusion, metabolites hitting organs. The physiology is treated as the rock everything else is built on. From the same symposium, Harriet Tucker discusses damage control pre-hospital care as a question of time and discipline: recognising the patient who cannot be fixed on the pavement, and moving. She is candid about the human logistics too, the work of getting ambulance crews on board so a pre-hospital team arriving on scene is met with an offer of help rather than confusion. Sheldon Cheskus brings the resuscitation research thread, from early work establishing that CPR quality actually mattered through to defibrillation strategy and the case for drones in rural and remote emergency response. Caroline Leech, recorded at BASICs, reads the resuscitative hysterotomy numbers closely and challenges the received timing, then redirects attention from knife to skin toward the decision to act and how a team processes what follows. Conferences function as more than backdrops here. The Big Sick and Incrementum come up warmly, with the observation that at some events the audience holds as much expertise as the stage. Sentences run long when the physiology demands it and clip short when the point is moral. What holds it together is a consistent instinct: get the evidence right, understand the mechanism, then ask what it means for the patient in front of you and for the person treating them.