The West Midlands Regional Trauma Care Network will go live in March 2012 and UHCW has been confirmed as one of the 3 trauma centres across the West Midlands, the other two being QE in Birmingham and University Hospital North Staffordshire.

This will mean that UHCW can advance its specialist care that it provides for patients that suffer traumatic injuries within the region, allowing students to experience further exposure to such patients and to gain a specialist education in this type of treatment.

Barts and The London have launched a new distance learning MSc in Trauma Sciences for those with a specialist interest in this area that includes a summer school to develop skills in this specialist field.

Professor David Lockey is a consultant that has worked for many years with the London Air Ambulance and has now been made a Professor of Prehospital Emergency Medicine at University of Bristol.

The Annual Emergency Services Show is back at Stoneleigh Park on 23rd and 24th November. There will be plenty of exhibitors and stands relevant to STEPs areas of interest.

Admission to the exhibitions and stands is free and yet again it promises to provide plenty of opportunities to see some of the latest developments in trauma and emergency patient care.

STEP would be keen to send a group of students to this event and will be setting up a group ticket account, so if you would like to attend please email stepcommittee@live.co.uk and we will register you for a ticket as part of our group.

The new policy on how ED's in England will be performance measured have been released and made active, replacing the original 4-hour rule we have all seen in practice. Now there are 8 clinical quality indicators in place to measure each ED's performance.

The Department of Health has recently discussed how this new data, which began in April, will be used.

It may not be directly relevant to us as med students now, but it will help us understand the indicators likely to be in place when we enter acute medicine foundation jobs and how the indicators will be used to measure the facilities we are employed in.

The WMAS has recently shown that it's patients are directly benefiting from improvements in their service provision in a recent National Audit Office paper.

A new focus on clinical outcomes as well as response times has shown that the emergency and urgent ambulance services are helping to improve the service patients receive, whilst matching the ever increasing demand.

The future of major trauma centres in the West Midladns is currently under review; looking at a variety of possibilities all designed to promote the best possible care for patients involved in major trauma. This follows the launch of the "London Trauma Service" that became operational in April 2010.

Coventry's UHCW Trust is one of the hospitals being considered as one of the trauma units.