emergency medicine

emergency medicine, medical specialty emphasizing the immediacy of treatment of acutely ill or injured individuals.

Among the factors that influenced the growth of emergency medicine was the increasing specialization in other areas of medicine. With the shift away from general practice—especially in urban centres—the emergency room became for many, in effect, a primary source of health care. Another factor was the adoption of a number of standard emergency procedures—such as immediate paramedic attention to severe wounds and the rapid transportation of the ill or injured to a hospital—that had evolved in the military medical corps; as used in the civilian hospital, these techniques resulted in such measures as the training of paramedics and the development of the hospital emergency room as a major trauma centre.

Together these factors led to a greatly increased demand for emergency services and in the early 1960s led to the full-time staffing of hospital emergency rooms. The physicians who led the emergency-room team, once recruited from other specialties, felt an increasing demand for training in the management of both major traumas and a wide range of acute medical problems. Emergency medicine became an officially recognized specialty in 1979. In the following decades, prehospital care benefited from technological advances, particularly in the area of cardiac life-support.