Emergency Medicine Post Graduation
We strongly recommend a fair share of 20% of the present total postgraduate seats for emergency medicine. It will not be an easy task as it will still take 40 years to realize the dream of appropriate and timely emergency care of patients. There is a further roadblock as postgraduate seats are currently only 45000 with a significant disparity of specialties. An unpublished survey of medical interns in India has shown that young doctors are more willing to choose emergency medicine as their postgraduate course.
Emergency Medicine in India – First Step towards Capacity Building
India is witnessing the momentum to increase the postgraduate seats in the specialty of Emergency Medicine because of the clause of the mandatory department by 2022 in all teaching hospitals. The need was realized way back in 2009 when the Medical Council of India (present National Medical Council) had recognized emergency medicine as a separate academic department. The National Board of Education also acknowledged the same in 2013. However, over the last 12 years, only 144 MD and 139 DNB Emergency Medicine seats have been granted by the Officiating Medical bodies. This should be viewed seriously in context of the standard treatment guidelines for most common emergencies e.g., Time is Muscle as in acute coronary event, Time is Brain for stroke, Golden Hour of Resuscitation for trauma, the first hour sepsis bundle and the rapid triage of a Covid-19 patient.
We want to bring to your notice the comparative statistics of our postgraduate seats to the other countries. There are 467044 total active physicians in 2020 in emergency medicine in the United States (population of 330 million), with an overall density of emergency physicians per 100,000 population as 14.9. We are the second-largest populated country in the world(with more than 1.36 billion people) and four times more populated than the US. 467044 casualty cases reach our emergency departments every year with a 3% steadily increasing number of emergencies yearly. Unfortunately, our Emergency trained physician density is very dismal. The USA has one emergency physician for 6757 people. If we want to improve our emergency medical care to the same standards, we should also aim for the same ratio and build a force of 192390 emergency physicians to cater to our population. This can be achieved by at least allotting 11,340 PG seats in emergency medicine every year.