Emergency Medicine and Intensive Care

Emergency medicine is a primary medical specialty that includes the skills and knowledge necessary to prevent, diagnose, and treat the entire spectrum of urgent medical, mental, and emotional conditions that affect people of all ages. The emphasis in emergency medicine is on a comprehensive approach to the patient, in which the physicians who specialize in the profession treat at least the initial symptoms of the patients and the injured and share other subjects or transfer responsibility to physicians from another specialty as needed to alleviate the patient's condition. Patients who are referred to the Emergency Medicine Department at the hospital and seek treatment are provided with effective and timely treatment with special emphasis on patients suffering from life-threatening or time-sensitive conditions. Emergency room care includes initial evaluation, triage and prioritization of treatment, resuscitation, diagnosis and treatment of conditions that are not yet defined or diagnosed, using a variety of technological and diagnostic measures and assisted by specialists from other medical professions as needed.

Emergency medicine also involves the management of disaster and emergency events such as treatment of casualties in the field and within the hospital's emergency wards. Physicians specialize in resuscitation and acute life-threatening situations, and therefore are involved in imparting this knowledge to paramedics and other paramedical teams.

Emergency medicine is a relatively new profession in Israel (since 2000), but it has been known since the 1970s in English-speaking countries and today is one of the most sought-after specialties. There are two specialization tracks: a major internship of 4.5 years, and a two-year senior internship (internal medicine, surgery, anesthesia, family medicine, children). In the State of Israel, 156 emergency medicine doctors are currently interned, and about 70 doctors have already passed the examinations as a major internship. In the State of Israel, the burden on the departments is increasing from year to year, mainly due to the increase in age of the patients and the complexity of the morbidities they suffer from. The relatively small number of hospital beds in Israel creates delays in hospitalizing patients quickly.

The Emergency Medical Community of the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at the Tel Aviv University consists of six emergency medical departments: Tel Aviv Medical Center, Sheba Medical Center, Rabin Medical Center (Beilinson and Hasharon), Meir Medical Center, Assaf Harofeh Medical Center And the Wolfson Medical Unit, which includes emergency and pediatric emergency units, together with 991,400 patients each year. The Department of Emergency Medicine teaches all medical students in the faculty who undergo a week-long clinic and the pre-clinical phase of the Faculty of Dental Medicine.