As an emergency medicine expert, you should provide immediate care for severe health issues and injuries. You are in the first line of healthcare specialists who care for people who deal with trauma, and your role is to stabilize them so that they can receive further care in a hospital.
When working in the emergency medicine sector, you may join an ambulance transport team, apply for a job in a hospital emergency room or be part of an emergency flight crew. You can choose from different professions if you follow the emergency medicine career path, including:
– Critical or emergency care nurse
– Paramedic
– Emergency medical technician
As you may imagine, any of the above professions require a tremendous amount of training and dedication because you’ll work in the lifesaving field of medicine. Is emergency medicine the best fit for you? Before enrolling in an EMT certification class or going to college, you should ask yourself a couple of questions to determine if this career is the best match for you.
Do you find joy in helping people in need?
The emergency medicine profession implies helping people in the worst moments of their life when they’re injured and scared. They trust you and your skills to help them reach the hospital where they can receive professional care. You need to provide compassionate help and empathize with the people you meet on the field and the onlookers, the patients’ families, and everyone you meet. Expect to reach home exhausted most days because there are also people who need medical help. But the satisfaction is that when you leave work, you know you save lives and make a positive difference in other people’s lives. However, suppose you don’t like to help people and find it difficult to stay calm in emergency situations and be compassionate with others. In that case, the emergency medicine field may not be the right choice for you.
Are you a trustworthy and dedicated individual?
As a healthcare professional, you always have people’s lives in your hands. Your colleagues should be able to trust your skills and knowledge, no matter if you work in an ambulance, in a hospital, or flying on an emergency helicopter. You need to prove to both your colleagues and patients that you are dedicated to helping your patients, and you won’t ever waiver on duty. When working in the emergency medicine field, you commit to helping other people daily, working hard to help them stay healthy, and being where you’re needed.
Emergency medicine requires you to be dedicated to the job like no other field because there are good days, but there are also challenging ones when you’ll question everything you know.
Can you handle a fast-paced, high-pressure, and stressful job? Are you able to think straight and maintain your calm in a life-threatening situation?
Before getting your EMT Certification, answer the above questions. The emergency medicine field requires professionals to perform through their assessments and make quick decisions that directly impact the patients’ lives. In most situations, you don’t have time to ask for a second opinion, pause to give your decision a second thought or slip up. You need to excel under pressure and make the best decisions. It doesn’t really matter if you’re working on an ambulance or in the emergency room of a hospital, you’ll always be on a rush and have to manage stressful situations.
Can you work in a team?
It takes a joint effort to save a life, so most emergency healthcare professionals work in teams. It doesn’t matter if you’re a dispatcher, paramedic, or EMT, you’ll always have to collaborate with other specialists when answering a 911 call. You’ll never work a single day alone in this field, and you need to have teamwork skills to succeed in your job. Even if you have the needed skills and knowledge to treat the patient on your own, you still have to work with other healthcare specialists, even if it means teaching a student or asking a nurse to take the tests.
Are you always aware of your surroundings? Do you have self-awareness skills?
Supposing you work on an ambulance, every time you arrive at the scene of an emergency, you should be ready to evaluate the situation and identify the factors that triggered the emergency. It’s also crucial to determine if there are factors that impact the scene safety and identify the steps you must follow to treat the patients and get your team safely back to the station. As you care for the patients, you need to be aware of the surroundings because you also have to protect your team and the other individuals present on the scene. If you’re putting yourself in danger, who’s going to help the patients?
How good do you communicate with other people?
When dealing with an emergency situation, accurate, fast, and effective communication is essential and can make the difference between a saved and lost life. If you want to work as an emergency healthcare specialist, you need to work on your communication skills continuously. While treating the patients on the scene, you should give your team and the onlookers directions and take directions from other emergency responders.
How do you handle change?
What’s unique to emergency medicine is the variety of cases you’re dealing with daily. You should be prepared to see everything because you can deliver a baby in one moment, and save a drowning patient in the other. Emergency medicine will expose you to some of the most strange and interesting situations, and you should be ready to embrace the change and go with the flow. You’ll often have to come up with innovative solutions to help your patients, so building relationships with your colleagues and listening to their recommendations can always prove helpful. Medicine similarly to other industries, can be fragmented and segmented, but you’ll interact with everyone as emergency healthcare professional.
Final thoughts
If you’ve answered the above questions, you probably can determine if you have a future in emergency medicine.
