Together for Emergency Medicine in the United Arab Emirates!
Abstract
As I began writing this article, I was stunned realizing that September 2019 marks the anniversary of a ten-year journey for the specialty of emergency medicine (EM) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). I had returned home to the UAE after 17 years’ acquiring and refining knowledge and skills as well as building experience and expertise abroad. This included medical school studies in Ireland,1 an Emergency Medicine (EM) Residency training in Montreal, Quebec2, a Prehospital Care fellowship in Toronto, Ontario,3 a Disaster Medicine fellowship in Boston, Massachusetts4, and finally a public health graduate degree in Baltimore, Maryland5. Throughout that time spent in nations where EM was well-developed, I was persistently asking myself, “What can I learn from here to allow me to develop EM back home?”. This challenging journey was certainly exciting and beneficial and exposed me to so many different “systems”, to their strengths and weaknesses, to the different approaches used to address problems, needs and day-to-day operations, and reinforced my belief that there is room and a need for flexibility, variability and diversity in the EM models one could build.