Experts from around the world are gathering in Norway today to consider how the unique medical skills pioneered in Aberdeen for the oil and gas platforms of the North Sea can be transferred to ever more hostile environments.
Professor Nelson Norman, president of the city’s Institute of Remote Healthcare, will address an audience of more than 100 professionals at a workshop in Bergen.
The event, led by Shell and involving health and safety professionals, energy bosses, academics and emergency medical providers, is the first meeting of its kind to be held.
Organisers hope delegates will reach an international agreement on the support needed for the new breed of offshore medic in terms of training, regulation and research.
Prof Norman, who co-founded the Institute of Remote Healthcare (IRHC) and laid much of the groundwork for the discipline during the 1970s oil boom, said he hoped Aberdeen would be at the centre of any future plans.
“We have come a long way,” he said.
“Medics can be trained and licensed to work in the North Sea now, but the next thing they know they might be working in Kazakhstan or South Sudan, where the issues they face are completely different.
“The big companies are looking now at even more remote places, like Siberia, Western Greenland and the Falkland Islands, where it is not so easy to evacuate casualties or do a lot of the other things we do in the North Sea.
“It might be that we need to upgrade the skills of the medics, develop better communications or make more consultants available to advise them.”
Prof Nelson said it was important to recognise the wide-ranging skills of offshore medics.
“They are not doctors, or nurses, or paramedics,” he said.
“They have a very broad based set of skills, taking in things like public health, hygiene, psychiatry, dentistry. It’s an entirely new medical speciality. “Here in Aberdeen we have been involved in the development of this unique form of remote medicine from the start, and we are very well-placed to take a lead in developing a new co-ordinated international approach.”
The inaugural Remote Healthcare Consensus Workshop 2013 is being held today and tomorrow. Other speakers will include Alistair Fraser, vice-president, health, from Shell International, and experts from Haukeland University in Norway, ExxonMobil and the International Maritime Organisation.