Emergency department in the context of "Emergency medicine"

Acute medicine, also known as acute internal medicine (AIM), is a specialty within internal medicine concerned with the immediate and early specialist management of adult patients with a wide range of medical conditions who present in hospital as emergencies. It developed in the United Kingdom in the early 2000s as a dedicated field of medicine, together with the establishment of acute medical units in numerous hospitals. Acute medicine is distinct from the broader field of emergency medicine, which is concerned with the management of all people attending the emergency department, not just those with internal medicine diagnoses.

A hospital is a healthcare institution providing patient treatment with specialized health science and auxiliary healthcare staff and medical equipment. The best-known type of hospital is the general hospital, which typically has an emergency department to treat urgent health problems ranging from fire and accident victims to a sudden illness. A district hospital typically is the major health care facility in its region, with many beds for intensive care and additional beds for patients who need long-term care.

Specialized hospitals include trauma centers, rehabilitation hospitals, children's hospitals, geriatric hospitals, and hospitals for specific medical needs, such as psychiatric hospitals for psychiatric treatment and other disease-specific categories. Specialized hospitals can help reduce health care costs compared to general hospitals. Hospitals are classified as general, specialty, or government depending on the sources of income received.

A trauma center, or trauma centre, is a hospital equipped and staffed to provide care for patients suffering from major traumatic injuries such as falls, motor vehicle collisions, or gunshot wounds. The term "trauma center" may be used incorrectly to refer to an emergency department (also known as a "casualty department" or "accident and emergency") that lacks the presence of specialized services or certification to care for victims of major trauma.

In the United States, a hospital can receive trauma center status by meeting specific criteria established by the American College of Surgeons (ACS) and passing a site review by the Verification Review Committee. Official designation as a trauma center is determined by individual state law provisions. Trauma centers vary in their specific capabilities and are identified by "Level" designation, Level I (Level-1) being the highest and Level III (Level-3) being the lowest (some states have four or five designated levels).

General anaesthesia (UK) or general anesthesia (US) is medically induced loss of consciousness that renders a patient unarousable even by painful stimuli. It is achieved through medications, which can be injected or inhaled, often with an analgesic and neuromuscular blocking agent.

General anaesthesia is usually performed in an operating theatre to allow surgical procedures that would otherwise be intolerably painful for a patient, or in an intensive care unit or emergency department to facilitate endotracheal intubation and mechanical ventilation in critically ill patients. Depending on the procedure, general anaesthesia may be optional or required. No matter whether the patient prefers to be unconscious or not, certain pain stimuli can lead to involuntary responses from the patient, such as movement or muscle contractions, that make the operation extremely difficult. Thus, for many procedures, general anaesthesia is necessary from a practical point of view.

A first responder is a person with specialized training who is among the first to arrive and provide assistance or incident resolution at the scene of an emergency. First responders typically include:

• law enforcement officers (commonly known as police officers),
• emergency medical services members (such as EMTs or paramedics), and
• fire service members (such as firefighters, search and rescue members, technical/heavy rescue members, etc.)

In some jurisdictions, emergency department personnel, such as doctors and nurses, are also required to respond to disasters and critical situations, designating them first responders; in other jurisdictions, military and security forces may also be authorized to act as first responders.

Critical emergency medicine (CREM) refers to the acute medical care of patients who have medical emergencies that pose an immediate threat to life, irrespective of location. In particular, the term is used to describe the role of anaesthesiologists in providing such care.

The term was introduced in 2010 in a position paper by the Scandinavian Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine, who defined it as "immediatelife support and resuscitation of critically ill and injured patients in the pre-hospital as well as hospital settings". It describes the roles and competencies of anaesthesiologists and intensive care physicians in caring for patients with life-threatening illness or injury who require resuscitation or support of their vital functions, particularly in Scandinavia and other parts of Europe. One reason the term was introduced was to distinguish these core activities from the broader internationally recognised medical specialty of emergency medicine; the latter deals with the acute care of a broad range of minor to major medical problems that present to an emergency department,.

An emergency physician is a physician who specializes in emergency medicine. They typically work in the emergency department of a hospital and provide care to patients requiring urgent medical attention. Their scope of practice includes advanced cardiac life support (or advanced life support in Europe), resuscitation, trauma care (such as treatment of fractures and soft tissue injuries), and management of other life-threatening conditions. Alternative titles for this role include emergency medicine physician, emergentologist, ER physician, or ER doctor (with ER standing for an emergency room, primarily used in the United States).

In some European countries (e.g. Germany, Belgium, Poland, Austria, Denmark and Sweden), emergency physicians or anaesthetists are also part of the emergency medical service. They are dispatched together with emergency medical technicians and paramedics in cases of potentially life-threatening situations such as serious accident or injury, unconsciousness, heart attack, cardiac arrest, stroke, anaphylaxis, or drug overdose. In the United States, emergency physicians are mostly hospital-based, but also work on air ambulances and mobile intensive care units.