Emergency Medicine

Emergency Medicine is a speciality of medicine that focuses on diagnosis and treatment of acute illnesses and injuries that require immediate medical attention. While not usually providing long-term or continuous 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.

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.

See Wikipedia, Emergency medicine.