Emergency Medicine Physicians
On the afternoon of July 25, 2018, a four-year-old Tunisian boy named Haroun Saber was playing on a Red Sea beach in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, when he suddenly slipped into the water and nearly drowned, had his mother not noticed quickly and pulled him out of the sea. But he was unconscious, and his lips had turned blue, so his mother rushed him immediately to a hospital, where emergency department doctors managed to treat him and provide the right care, saving his life after he arrived unconscious and unable to breathe because water had gotten into his respiratory system. If you or a family member has ever experienced an accident or a sudden health emergency, you already know that the first people to respond to such cases are emergency physicians — the people we've all seen so often in movies, rushing toward accident victims, women about to give birth, and elderly people suffering heart attacks or strokes. The emergency department is the most visited department in hospitals around the world, with millions of patients and injured people flocking to it every year in every country. For example: in the United States, about 136 million people visit emergency rooms annually; in Britain, an average of 1.7 million patients visited emergency departments in 2022; in the United Arab Emirates, more than 1.9 million people visited hospital emergency departments between 2016 and 2018. An emergency physician isn't like other doctors who specialize in just one medical field — they're a doctor with broad experience and medical qualifications that let them handle any case requiring immediate medical attention, whether it involves children, adults, or the elderly, men or women. The emergency physician's main task is rapid intervention: assessing the health condition of patients and injured people who come into the emergency department and taking the necessary medical action as quickly as possible to save lives that could be lost within moments or minutes without the right treatment.
Meet the Writer: Waleed Abo Omiraa
What You'll Actually Do
The core tasks and responsibilities that fill a typical day.
- Analyze records, examination information, or test results to diagnose medical conditions.
- Assess patients' pain levels or sedation requirements.
- Collect and record patient information, such as medical history or examination results, in electronic or handwritten medical records.
- Communicate likely outcomes of medical diseases or traumatic conditions to patients or their representatives.
- Conduct primary patient assessments that include information from prior medical care.
- Consult with hospitalists and other professionals, such as social workers, regarding patients' hospital admission, continued observation, transition of care, or discharge.
- Direct and coordinate activities of nurses, assistants, specialists, residents, and other medical staff.
- Discuss patients' treatment plans with physicians and other medical professionals.
- Evaluate patients' vital signs or laboratory data to determine emergency intervention needs and priority of treatment.
- Identify factors that may affect patient management, such as age, gender, barriers to communication, and underlying disease.
- Monitor patients' conditions, and reevaluate treatments, as necessary.
- Perform emergency resuscitations on patients.
- Perform such medical procedures as emergent cricothyrotomy, endotracheal intubation, and emergency thoracotomy.
- Refer patients to specialists or other practitioners.
- Select and prescribe medications to address patient needs.
- Select, request, perform, or interpret diagnostic procedures, such as laboratory tests, electrocardiograms, emergency ultrasounds, and radiographs.
- Stabilize patients in critical condition.