Introductory Chapter: The Role of Emergency Medical Service Physician

Abstract

Almost 45 years since the inception of first modern emergency medical services (EMS) in the United States with the Highway Safety Act of 1966 and the EMS Services Development Act of 1973 [1, 2], the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) voted in 2011 to create a new physician subspecialty called “emergency medical services” [3]. The American Board of Emergency Medicine was named the parent board for this subspecialty and held its first board certification exam in 2013. The first suggestions about an EMS subspecialty head back to late 1990s by the creation of an ABEM task force and later, in 2001, by National Association of Emergency Medical Society Physicians (NAEMSP’s EMS Physician) Certification Task Force. Yet, it took another ten years and the continuous tremendous advance in prehospital care in the last decades that finally led to the new emergency medicine subspecialty [4]. Today, the list of the existing subspecialties of emergency medicine [5] is: