an itinerant observer

I will never forget the day when I learned the meaning of stress in the Emergency Department (ED). There was a massive multi-vehicle road traffic accident and many patients were brought in, pulling away most of the ED doctors and nurses on call, leaving the rest of the ED at my disposal. I was focusing on a procedure to save a man with a life-threateningly low blood pressure, when a nurse approached me with an electro-cardiogram of a new patient. Even at a distance, I could see he was suffering from a massive heart attack. And if anything worse couldn’t have happened, there was an overhead page for another trauma patient. I felt my blood pressure rise and I said to myself, “I can’t do this anymore!” What makes ED physicians not only stay calm, but function at the height of their game in face of an emergency? Some people may be a natural at this. But for those who are not, including myself, I have learned that we can rise to the challenge, eventually surprising ourselves. In or...

George Clooney wielded immense power in the very popular TV show ‘ER’. The uber confidence he exuded probably factored into my decision for that field. After all there is a certain charm in being part of an adrenaline-driven ER team that is resuscitating an adult trauma victim or a baby suffering from septic shock. I think the emergency room is a microcosm of what the outside world is really like. Working in an ER of a major metropolitan area provides a fascinating view of humanity, irrespective of location of the ER under consideration. Whether inner or outer city of a developing or developed nation, you tend to manage not only the emergent needs of your patients, but also get to learn about effective and ineffective health systems. Armed with the above awareness, I recently travelled to Dallas, Texas to attend the annual meeting of the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine. I had thought that in addition to learning about improving efficiency of the emergency department t...