Home > Emergency Medicine > Choosing EM as a Career

What to do and what not to do.

Do not choose EM just because someone else has advised you to do so.

Work in a well established emergency department for no less, we repeat, no less than six months (Ideally a year) before you decide to choose or criticize EM.

There is no point in working in a casualty or ER where emergency medicine is not established. Similarly there is absolutely no point in taking career advice or comments from people who have no experience of working in EM. Only qualified emergency physicians who have worked in independent emergency departments know what its like to be working in EM and they are the best individuals to get advice from.

If you want patients to be admitted under you , remember you, thank you for all the work you have done, EM should NOT be your choice.

If you love challenges of diagnosing, stabilizing and treating very sick patients in extremely short spans of time, then you will like EM.

Practice in EM demands excellent communication skills and knowledge of human psychology. An emergency physician has to deal, as well as establish rapport, with patients and their attenders who are in an extremely stressful situation of an unexpected emergency. An EP has to deal with crying children; abusive & violent patients; attenders who, more often than not, think that the problem is not worth admitting the patient (despite the patient having something like acute MI or sepsis); patients who don't trust doctors; anxious & depressed patients; overworked staff and the rest. So make sure you are ready for this.

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Read this excellent article "Emergency medicine as a career choice" by Society of Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM)

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