Emergency Physician: Job Description and Educational Requirements

Emergency physicians typically work in hospital emergency rooms or urgent care clinics, serving patients with critical conditions. Their job is to stabilize patients for referral to the appropriate department for further evaluation. Emergency physicians generally have very short-lived relationships with patients and treat conditions that span all areas of medicine. This career field requires a medical degree, a medical residency and successful completion of the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE).

Emergency physicians often treat patients who have life-threatening conditions. Their primary job functions are to resuscitate or stabilize patients and refer them to the appropriate medical departments. For this reason, emergency physicians often work as part of a team, with physicians of other specialties and other members of the emergency room staff. Emergency physicians must evaluate a wide variety of ailments, sometimes with little to no information. They must be able to think and act quickly to make a tentative diagnosis and determine the appropriate course of treatment.

Median Annual Salary ~ $ 206,114

The emergency physician is a specialist in advanced cardiac life support (advanced life support in Europe), trauma care such as fractures and soft tissue injuries, and management of other life-threatening situations. In the United States, emergency physicians are mostly hospital-based, but they often work on air ambulances and mobile intensive-care units.

When a patient is brought into the emergency department, he or she is usually sent to triage first. The patient may be triaged by an emergency physician, a paramedic, or a nurse; in the United States, triage is usually performed by a registered nurse. If the patient is admitted to the hospital, another physician such as a cardiologist or neurologist takes over from the emergency physician.