The future of Emergency Medicine: Simon Carley

Dr Simon Carley discusses the future of emergency medicine. Simon begins by talking about how things have changed in emergency medicine since he started his career in the 1990s. He wants to shed some light on where we are going with emergency medicine, what is happening to us and what is shaping us. He believes that predictions about the future, as shown in movies like Back to the Future, might not always come true but they certainly provide clues as to what is possible. According to Simon, three major factors influence the future of emergency medicine. The first factor is the people. Population predictions show that life expectancy has gone up, leading to an increase in the number of elderly people. As the age of the population increases, the age of the people dying due to trauma becomes older. This changes the approach of emergency medicine. Moreover, the age of the workforce in medicine is also increasing. Simon believes that the rigid systems must change to encourage the next generation of healthcare workers to enter medicine. Patients, pathologies, and the workforce are changing. The second factor influencing emergency medicine is politics. There is an increased financial constraint on health services which is in part due to increases in technology. Horizontal equity, where everyone gets equal treatment, and vertical equity, where some people get more, must be balanced. This can be achieved by involving emergency physicians in the political decision making. The future points in a direction where emergency medicine divides into different specialties which according to Simon might not be the right path. Furthermore, the third factor affecting emergency medicine is technology. Technology is essentially revision and refinement making things cheaper, easier, and portable. Revolution in technology is what matters. It changes the way we approach emergency medicine in fields like decision support, disease probability models and personal diagnostics turning doctors into probabilistic clinicians. Simon believes that though we cannot actually predict the future, we can definitely get involved in shaping it, making the future of emergency medicine as exciting as the past. Tune in as Dr Simon Carley discusses the future of emergency medicine. Finally, for more like this, head to https://codachange.org/podcasts/