This Monday, doctors took a step forward on the path to creating the specialty of urgent and emergency medicine. The Medical Association approved the creation of a working group to prepare the new capacity, considered essential to ‘qualify’ specialists for the work dedicated to SOS in hospitals. Failed at the end of 2022, the specialty can now be voted on again.
To Expresso, the president, Carlos Cortes, explained that in this Monday’s Assembly of Representatives “the proposal was voted to send for public discussion†to support the new medical specialization, †œan important step that had not been achieved previously”. Still, it will be necessary to wait: “It will only be approved, or not, in September.â€
The Assembly of Representatives of the Medical Association that now ‘approved’ the creation of the new specialty was the same structure, then with other elements, that failed emergency medicine – with 51 votes against, 21 in favor and three abstentions – in the final stretch of the leadership of previous president Miguel Guimarães. It was proposed in the summer of 2019 by Vítor Almeida, the new president of INEM and then president of the College of Emergency Medicine Competence, in partnership with Adelina Pereira, current president of the Portuguese Society of Urgency and Emergency Medicine .
According to this Monday’s document, urgent and emergency medicine “constitutes added value to the health system, respecting the skills and responsibilities of other specialties already present in the Emergency Service, assuming a character of complementarity and freeing them for differentiated and specific acts of these specialties”. In other words, “this specialty thus assumes its specificity, individuality and collaborative character in the multidisciplinary team that constitutes the intervention in the Emergency Service†.
