By Dr Sandeep B. Gore, Director – Emergency Medicine, Fortis Hospital, Mulund, Mumbai & Organising Chairman, EMCON 2026.
The 28th National Conference of the Society for Emergency Medicine India will be held from October 30 to November 1, 2026, at The Westin Mumbai Powai Lake. EMCON returns to Mumbai after 12 years, with more than 2,000 delegates, 300+ national faculty members and 50+ international faculty members expected to attend.
The significance of the conference extends beyond its scale. It reflects the evolution of Emergency Medicine in India and the growing role of emergency departments in modern healthcare.
Not very long ago, emergency care in many Indian hospitals was considered a transit point where patients arrived before being referred to a physician, surgeon or intensivist. That model is changing. The modern Emergency Medicine Department is increasingly functioning as a clinical command centre.
A patient with a blocked coronary artery cannot wait. A stroke cannot wait. Septic shock cannot wait. Polytrauma cannot wait. A compromised airway certainly cannot wait. During the first few minutes of an emergency, there is often no complete diagnosis and no luxury of time. The emergency physician must recognise physiological collapse, establish priorities, initiate resuscitation, use bedside diagnostics, mobilise multidisciplinary teams and make decisions whose consequences may last a lifetime.
Emergency Medicine is therefore both the art of rapidly evaluating undifferentiated patients and transforming those presentations into decisive action, and the science of mastering resuscitation.
That philosophy lies at the heart of EMCON 2026. The conference theme, “Innovation, Collaboration and Excellence in Emergency Medicine,” reflects the belief that excellence in Emergency Medicine begins with excellence in resuscitation.
Resuscitation excellence cannot be built by doctors alone. It requires nurses, paramedics, pre-hospital systems, hospital leadership, policymakers, researchers, technology, industry and collaboration with the global Emergency Medicine community.
EMCON 2026 will bring Indian Emergency Medicine into closer conversation with the global community. Keynote speakers include Dr Ian Higginsin - President of Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), Dr L. Antony Cirillo, President of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), Dr Pauline Convocar - President of the International Federation for Emergency Medicine (IFEM) and Dr Julina Md Noor - President of the World Interactive Network Focused on Critical Ultrasound (WINFOCUS).
Another keynote speaker, Padma Shri Dr Himmatrao Bawaskar, represents the ability of meticulous bedside observation, scientific curiosity and perseverance to solve problems affecting patients far away from sophisticated academic centres. His pioneering work in scorpion envenomation highlights how innovation can begin beside a critically ill patient in rural India rather than inside an expensive laboratory.
Learning at EMCON 2026 will begin before the main conference. The 28 pre-conference workshops across institutions and cities will cover skills that define contemporary Emergency Medicine, including Point of Care Ultrasound in Emergency Medicine POCUS in EM, Crisis airway management, Mechanical Ventilation in ED, Toxicology, advanced resuscitative simulation, artificial intelligence, Maternal arrest resuscitation, Resuscitative thoracotomy in ED, Clinical Governance in EM, high-reliability Emergency Departments, ECPR in ED bootcamps & Frontline ER (Workshop for paramedics).
Emergency Medicine cannot be learnt only from a podium. It is a hands-on discipline.
Emergency Medicine is no longer a new discipline in India. It has become one of the most decisive front doors of modern healthcare. Over the last couple of years, Dr Sandeep B. Gore has personally visited around 100 Emergency Medicine Departments across India and interacted with hundreds of Emergency Physicians across different states, institutions and healthcare systems, government as well as private.
The infrastructure varies. Resources vary. Patient volumes vary enormously. But the identity of Indian Emergency Medicine is becoming stronger. At the centre of that identity is resuscitation.
The defining question is what Emergency Physicians are masters of. The answer is resuscitation.
This does not mean merely performing CPR or managing cardiac arrest. Modern resuscitation begins much earlier. It involves recognising physiological deterioration before collapse, understanding why a patient is unstable, intervening rapidly, reassessing continuously and changing treatment based on the patient's evolving physiology.
Point-of-care testing (POCT) and Point of Care Ultrasound (POCUS) in Emergency Medicine have brought critical diagnostics closer to the bedside. Blood gases, lactate, cardiac biomarkers, ketones and other parameters can now influence decisions within minutes.
Resuscitative Point-of-Care Ultrasound has been one of the most transformative additions to Emergency Medicine. The Emergency Physician can assess cardiac function, lung pathology, volume status, internal bleeding and haemodynamic response during active resuscitation itself and observe real time reversal of disease.
The clinical question is no longer simply whether the blood pressure is low. The more important question is why it is low and what the patient needs immediately.
That may involve fluid, a vasopressor, inotropy, blood, drainage of a tamponade, relief of tension pneumothorax or immediate reperfusion.
The shift from generic resuscitation towards physiology-guided, patient-specific treatment represents the high end of Emergency Medicine today. It can be described as Precision Emergency Resuscitation.
Medicine is entering an extraordinary period of transformation. Artificial intelligence, digital health, point-of-care diagnostics, advanced ultrasound, simulation and extracorporeal resuscitation are expanding what can be achieved during the earliest minutes of illness.
Technology, however, is not the destination. Better outcomes are.
Innovation without systems creates impressive technology. Innovation integrated into systems saves lives. The future of Emergency Medicine will depend not only on what technology can do, but also on whether teams, training and systems are built to use it effectively.
The larger conversation therefore extends beyond EMCON. India needs to think of emergency care as an ecosystem. The next challenge is to build systems that can deliver the right care, at the right place, in the shortest possible time, whether an emergency occurs in Mumbai or in a small-town hundreds of kilometres from a tertiary hospital.
The Emergency Department has been described as the front door of a hospital. Increasingly, it is becoming something more: the point at which the preparedness of the entire healthcare system is tested.
Mumbai could perhaps be no more appropriate city for this gathering. Mumbai understands emergencies. It understands speed, uncertainty, resilience and teamwork. In many ways, it mirrors Emergency Medicine itself: relentless, responsive and resilient.
When thousands of emergency-care professionals gather in Mumbai, the agenda will extend beyond the exchange of scientific knowledge to questions about how every Emergency Department can be made safer, how advanced resuscitation can be brought closer to every Indian, how pre-hospital care can be strengthened, how the next generation can be trained differently, how AI can be used without losing clinical judgement and how healthcare can move from individual excellence to reliable systems.
Ultimately, the central question remains how many more lives Indian Emergency Medicine can save over the next decade. That is the real agenda of EMCON 2026.
EMCON 2026 will be hosted from 30 October to 1 November 2026 at The Westin Mumbai Powai Lake, Mumbai.
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