17/08/2025
TLDR : Emergency Physicians must retain unequivocal recognition as the irreplaceable custodians of emergency care and lead Emergency Departments within Malaysia, now and forever.
The Changing Face of the Emergency Department: Are Other Specialties Creeping In?
Globally scope creep Is setting in. Caregivers in what used to be inpatient disciplines are now reserving interstitial hours in the ED.
What’s Going On?
Around the world, several patterns are emerging:
• Subspecialist surgeons - are settling into shared 24/7 ED rotas alongside the acute care teams. The strategy is straightforward: as disciplines become narrower, the absolute volume of emergent cases pushing through the old specialty doorplate dwindles, and the subspecialists, desiring a spectrum of clinical exposure, fill the gaps.
• In the UK, the new liaison of “acute physicians” is expanding. They are orchestrating the care of the undefined initial hours of symptoms such as chest pain, syncope, or abdominal discomfort. What used to be a routine navigation toward general wards has become a structured stay within the ED, where acute physicians or Emergency Physicians (EPs) manage the clinical trajectory up to definitive disposition.
In a number of affluent nations, outpatients presenting with borderline or mildly atypical findings are routinely routed to the emergency department when they fall outside well-circumscribed subspecialty boundaries.
The Factors Behind This Trend
Increasing subspecialisation has left many practitioners with reduced exposure to acute presentations, thereby diminishing their acute care competencies and reinforcing the emergency department as the cockpit of acute medicine. Rotational training, reduced out-of-hours cover, and junior doctor fatigue mean the on-site subspecialty presence wanes during peak emergencies, further channelling all urgent presentations to the ED floor. Simultaneously, volume-based funding, performance metrics, and administrative cost pressures incentivize the hospital to compress the presentation-to-discharge intervals by leveraging the pooled resource base of the department.
Emergency Physicians Are More Than Curators of Care
The common portrayal of emergency clinicians as merely orchestral conductors - directing and rerouting fails to acknowledge their core responsibilities. Emergency physicians are accountable for:
1. Comprehensive primary assessment, critical stabilization, and the initiation of time-sensitive interventions, often prior to subspecialty engagement.
2. Curriculum-trained proficiency across all age strata and clinical domains, managing paediatrics, trauma, obstetrics, and psychiatric presentations often in parallel acuity tiers.
3. Dynamic, evidence-informed decision-making that fundamentally determines diagnostic, therapeutic, and disposition trajectories from the first patient heartbeat to admission or discharge.
Let’s Not Lose Sight of Our Role
As specialists increasingly practice in the Emergency Department, we must unequivocally honour the distinctive mastery that Emergency Physicians alone bring to the care continuum. Emergency Physicians are more than coordinators of specialty consultation; they are the immediate, embodied expression of emergency medicine. With unwavering fortitude, they es**rt patients through the most acute vulnerabilities, managing both life-threatening physiologic disturbance and the emotional fallout that accompanies sudden, critical illness.
