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Jobs and Information for Emergency Medicine
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Role in Healthcare Delivery
Emergency Medicine is a speciality of medicine that focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of acute illnesses and injuries that require immediate medical
attention. While not usually providing long-term or continuing care, emergency medicine physicians diagnose a wide array of pathology and undertake acute
interventions to stabilize the patient. These professionals practice in hospital emergency departments, in the prehospital setting via emergency medical
service and other locations where initial medical treatment of illness takes place. Just as clinicians operate by immediacy rules under large emergency
systems, emergency practioniers aim to diagnose emergent conditions and stabilize the patient for definitive care.
Urgent Care Centers are often staffed by physicians, physician assistants, nurses and nurse practitioners who may or may not be formally trained in
emergency medicine. They offer primary care treatment to patients who desire or require immediate care, but who do not reach the acuity that requires
care in an emergency department or admission to a hospital.
Emergency Medicine encompasses a large amount of general medicine but involves virtually all fields of medicine and surgery including the surgical sub-specialties.
Emergency physicians are tasked with seeing a large number of patients, treating their illnesses and arranging for disposition - either admitting them
to the hospital or releasing them after treatment as necessary. The emergency physician requires a broad field of knowledge and advanced procedural skills
often including surgical procedures, trauma resuscitation, advanced cardiac life support and advanced airway management. Emergency physicians ideally
have the skills of many specialists - the ability to manage a difficult airway (anesthesia), suture a complex laceration (plastic surgery), reduce (set)
a fractured bone or dislocated joint (orthopedic surgery), treat a heart attack (internist), work-up a pregnant patient with vaginal bleeding (Obstetrics
and Gynecology), and stop a bad nosebleed (ENT).
Definition provided by
Wikipedia
Education
In the US, Emergency Medicine is a moderately competitive specialty for medical graduates to enter, ranking 7 of 16 specialties in terms of percentage
of U.S. graduates whose applications are successful. However, over 90% of applicants from US medical schools to US Emergency Medicine residencies are
successful. [5] Emergency medicine residencies (MD,MBBS,MBChB) can be three or four years in length, depending on the training institution, while all
osteopathic (DO) residencies are four years in length, the first being a one-year traditional rotating internship. In addition to the didactic exposure,
much of an emergency medicine residency involves rotating through other specialties with a majority of such rotations through the emergency department
itself. By the end of their training, emergency physicians are expected to handle a vast field of medical, surgical, and psychiatric emergencies, and
are considered specialists in the stabilization and treatment of emergent condition. Emergency physicians are therefore both clinical generalists and
well-rounded diagnosticians. A number of fellowships are available for emergency medicine graduates including prehospital medicine (emergency medical
services), toxicology, sports medicine, ultrasound, and pediatric emergency medicine.
Definition provided by
Wikipedia
