Foreword to conference proceedings, inventing social emergency medicine

Before you are the proceedings of an invitational consensus conference called Inventing Social Emergency Medicine, including subsequent reflections and a supplemental riff off of the experience of being there. Invitees convened at the Dallas headquarters of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) for 2 days in September 2017 to do just as the title suggests: begin to provide some intellectual superstructure for what was a nascent field. Work had been done for many years to tease apart the complex interrelationship of social context and the emergency care system, but this work was just beginning to coalesce into a field. In fact, such a field had only relatively recently been dreamt of.

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