Expert group chemical hazards
One of the objectives of ICMM’s 2022 strategic plan for the near future is to increase ICMM’s output, and one of the means chosen to achieve this is to work with thematic working groups.
For many areas of medicine, military healthcare providers can find a lot of useful information and training opportunities in civilian medicine. This is much less the case for specific areas of great importance to military medicine, such as war surgery or CBRN. CBRN is a sensitive area, and obtaining quality information and appropriate training opportunities remains a challenge.
We believe that ICMM can play a useful role in this respect and, in line with our new motto “Knowledge beyond borders”, it has been decided to establish an “ad hoc” CBRN working group, which will initially focus on chemical threats and the medical management of chemical cases and incidents.
The following countries have pledged to allow experts to take part in this initiative: Australia, Belgium, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Iraq, Mali, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Our primary target audience is military care providers who are not CBRN specialists.
This ad hoc working group can also function as an exchange forum for experts, but an in-depth exchange between experts will be rather difficult, as in this forum we have to limit ourselves to sharing open-source information.
The experts will have a digital workspace accessible only to them, but the final results will be available on the CIMM website.
A digital kick-off meeting was held on April 22, 2022, during which the project was defined. Potential objectives were presented to the experts:
short-term: compile a large number of useful documents, recommend review articles and refer to interesting websites
medium-term: share existing conferences and ppt presentations
in the medium and long term: develop podcasts and webinars.
A second meeting was held in 2022, but only a very limited number of experts were able to attend. Activities will be relaunched in 2023.
If you’d like to get involved or find out more, please contact the General Secretariat: info@cimm-icmm.org