Critical emergency medicine

Critical emergency medicine (CREM) refers to the acute medical care of patients who have medical emergencies that pose an immediate threat to life. In particular, the term is used to describe the role of anaesthesiologists in providing such care.^[1] The term was proposed in 2010 in a position paper by the Scandinavian Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine, who defined it as "immediate life support and resuscitation of critically ill and injured patients in the pre-hospital as well as hospital settings".^[1] The term describes the role and competencies of anaesthesiologists and intensive care physicians in caring for patients with life-threatening illness or injury, particularly in Scandinavia and other parts of Europe. This is distinct from the broader international medical specialty of emergency medicine, which deals with the broad swathe of patients who may attend the emergency department and not just those with immediate life threats.^[1] In some countries, CREM is seen as being a subspecialty of anaesthesiology, rather than belonging to a separate specialty.

The European Board of Anaesthesiology and European Society of Anaesthesiology formally adopted the term in 2016 "to define anaesthesiologists’ competencies and role in the acute management of life-threatening emergencies", which had previously been referred to in the anaesthesiology speciality European training requirements simply as "emergency medicine".^[2] The European Training Requirement curriculum for anaesthesiology was updated in 2018 to state that knowledge, clinical skills and specific attitudes for CREM should be included as part of postgraduate training for medical practitioners specialising in anaesthesiology.^[3]

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