emDocs - April 27, 2105 By Alex Koyfman
"The most effective way to improve your skill as an emergency physician (EP) is to break down your job into its component responsibilities and develop a clear plan for each. I have determined that there are eight discrete responsibilities of the emergency doc, and we’ll discuss them in ascending importance, least important first. There are certainly other responsibilities emergency docs take on depending on their environment, but most of us are tasked with these eight, so let’s jump in.- Public Health
- Resource stewardship
- Customer service
- Managing ED flow
- Determination of disposition and level of care
- Symptom relief
- Identification of dangerous conditions
- Resuscitation
There is a lot more to the EM mindset than the eight responsibilities. Like being comfortable making very consequential decisions with incomplete information, being comfortable being interrupted every 30 seconds, being comfortable being screamed at (and vomited on) by strangers, being comfortable giving strangers the worst news they’ve ever had. And being comfortable reducing fractures, and defibrillating people in cardiac arrest, and delivering babies, and sewing up the laceration on the billionaire everyone’s heard of who’s lying one gurney over from the undocumented immigrant who also has a laceration and speaks a language no one’s heard of, and providing comfort care to the 96 year-old taking her last few breaths, and intubating the nearly dead 10 day-old with undiagnosed congenital heart disease."
http://www.emdocs.net/em-mindset-reuben-strayer-8-responsibilities-of-the-em-doc/