Emergency care conference in the land of a thousand hills

Rwanda may be the land of a thousand hills, but until recently it was also the land without decent emergency care. an‎d although there are as yet no Rwandan-trained emergency physicians, this is about to change; a cohort of local emergency medicine trainees have just completed the first two years of a four-year masters training programme and a local emergency care society, the Rwanda Emergency Care Association (RECA) held its first formal conference. The society was founded on 30 July 2015 to advocate for health care providers actively involved in emergency care in Rwanda. It was registered as a non-profit organisation early in 2016, and on 26 August 2016 held its first, one-day conference, aptly titled Emergency Medicine in a thousand hills. The conference was cunningly preceded by a two-week Emergency Medicine in the Tropics workshop hosted locally in Kigali by a shared local and international faculty. This workshop was aimed at non-African, emergency medicine trainees and had the upshot of providing both international exposure for the newly formed society as well as a welcome international presence during the conference. It also pro- vided an income boost to help host the conference.