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Reflections: A social emergency medicine call to arms: Promoting the adoption of social emergency medicine practices

T. Schneberk, R.J. Cooper
Ann Emerg Med

The mission of this movement is to recruit people from within the emergency medicine community to adopt and develop social emergency medicine practices. Investments in social emergency medicine efforts have the potential to promote holistic care, create partnerships that will establish health equity, improve health outcomes for our patients and society, and produce a more fulfilling work experience for providers.

Several steps need to be taken to accomplish this goal. First, the social emergency medicine lexicon can be standardized and simplified to enhance dissemination of digestible messaging, creating inclusive dialogue across the specialty. This means rallying around concepts that can unite multiple viewpoints. For instance, instead of labeling efforts in terms of “global health” or “domestic health,” we use the terminology of health equity to invite more collaboration and unite common goals.1 Second, we need to build on the previous work and expertise of other medical specialties and disciplines, such as public health, while creating multidisciplinary teams across educational (undergraduate, medical school, and nursing school) and professional (legal, social work, and policy) systems. Developing such collaborative relationships will provide the resources to help emergency providers implement social emergency medicine practices in a meaningful way.

This article is part of a special supplement: Inventing Social Emergency Medicine: A Consensus Conference to Establish the Intellectual Underpinnings of Social Emergency Medicine.

Schneberk T, Cooper RJ. Reflections: A social emergency medicine call to arms: Promoting the adoption of social emergency medicine practices. Ann Emerg Med. 2019;74(5):S17-S18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annemergmed.2019.08.435

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