Matthew Stampfl, MD, a third-year resident in the UW Emergency Medicine Residency Program and soon-to-be fellow with UW Health Med Flight, recently had the rare opportunity to help run a national conference and work alongside leaders in the field of emergency medicine, as he was selected as a 2022 JournalFeed/Hippo EM Essentials of Emergency Medicine (EEM) Education Fellow.
Dr. Stampfl won a national competition held by JournalFeed and Hippo EM to serve as this year’s Essentials of Emergency Medicine Education Fellow at its May 2022 conference. This is one of the largest live EM educational conferences in the world with over 2,000 attendees, and the fellowship is a pretty exclusive experience—only one EM resident from across the nation gets selected each year. Since the conference was moved to an on-demand format due to fluctuating COVID-19 cases around the country, Dr. Stampfl had the opportunity to travel to Los Angeles, CA, to record sessions on a sound stage in Hollywood.
Dr. Stampfl’s winning submission was a blog post highlighting the controversy in using TXA for epistaxis.
As part of the EEM conference staff, Dr. Stampfl had the rare opportunity to experience the behind-the-scenes work associated with developing and producing one of the world’s largest and best EM educational conferences. Fellow responsibilities included online chat moderation, social media management, CME preparation, research projects, and more. Additionally, Dr. Stampfl worked behind the scenes at the conference with master educators, including Drs. Amal Mattu, Matt DeLaney, Arun Sayal, Michael Weinstock, Paul Jhun and more.
Dr. Stampfl sat down for an interview about his experience as an EEM Education Fellow, for which only a handful of residents in the country have ever been selected. Read his answers below:
UW: WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO APPLY TO BE AN EEM EDUCATION FELLOW?
MS: I had first heard of the EEM fellowship when I was competing in the Emergency Medicine Residents Association’s (EMRA) 20 slides in 6 minutes speaking competition. The winner received a fellowship, and although I didn’t win, it got me looking into other opportunities to be an EEM fellow. So when I saw an email from JournalFeed that they were running a blog post competition in conjunction with Essentials of Emergency Medicine, I jumped at the opportunity.
UW: WHAT SORT OF WORK WILL YOU BE DOING AS A CONFERENCE EDUCATION FELLOW?
MS: Most of Essentials of Emergency Medicine this year was content recorded in a video studio to be released on-demand at a later time. For those sessions, the fellow helped to generate questions for the lecturing faculty to answer as well as education pearls (high-yield points) to be used in promoting and marketing the conference. A few of the sessions were live-streamed, so for those we helped to moderate the chat and identify listener questions so the lecturer could address them.
UW: HOW WAS IT HELPING TO RUN A VIRTUAL CONFERENCE?
MS: Well, it was my first time on a video/sound stage in Hollywood, so that was an experience in itself. We had to be very quiet during the filming since the microphones were so sensitive. I also felt something of a sense of pressure trying to come up with questions, since the fellows were standing in for a live audience and I wanted to make sure I asked about what later listeners would really want to know.
UW: WHAT ABOUT THIS EXPERIENCE IMPACTED YOU THE MOST, AND WHAT WILL YOU TAKE WITH YOU INTO THE NEXT STAGE OF YOUR CAREER?
MS: The best thing about the experience was the access we had to all of the faculty. Since the conference was virtual, it was just the fellows, the technical staff and the faculty. The EEM faculty are some of the best and most renowned speakers in emergency medicine so it was incredible being able to get to know them. They were very receptive to mentoring us and I made a number of contacts that will be valuable for me in the future.
