Full Life Support for Acute Care Surgery
Article Outline
To the Editor:
We thank Dr. Green for his interesting article on the emerging surgical discipline of acute care surgery and his perspective on the decline of trauma surgery.1
His article does describe the challenges of general trauma surgery and the unfortunate schism between the existing acute care specialties very nicely.
Over the last decades we have seen the rise of emergency medicine from a sidelined specialty to an equally recognized board certified specialty in the US, Canada, UK and Australasia. On its rise emergency medicine has faced significant challenges from its inception to its successful establishment in these and many more countries.
Although some of trauma surgeons' diagnostic and therapeutic duties have been taken over by emergency physicians, one of the most consistent frustrations of emergency physicians remains: the inability to receive expeditious help from surgical subspecialists, when it comes to interventions and admissions. The trend towards training of subspecialized subspecialists is worsening the situation.
Because of this trend we strongly believe that acute care surgery is a brave move towards a new direction and culture in patient care and can help to solve some of our problems.2
We should respect and support this newborn specialty with all means, and provide advanced life support through all stages until proven that acute care surgery is not our sister specialty we ever looked for. We should remind ourselves how emergency medicine got up to its feet many years ago.
We should not miss this unique opportunity to develop our relationship with acute care surgery but we should assist in shaping acute care surgery for the good of our patients.
References
Funding and support: By Annals policy, all authors are required to disclose any and all commercial, financial, and other relationships in any way related to the subject of this article that might create any potential conflict of interest. The author has stated that no such relationships exist. See the Manuscript Submission Agreement in this issue for examples of specific conflicts covered by this statement.
PII: S0196-0644(09)00374-6
doi:10.1016/j.annemergmed.2008.06.475
© 2009 American College of Emergency Physicians. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Refers to article:
- Trauma Surgery: Discipline in Crisis , 25 April 2008
