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, irrespective of location. In particular, the term is used to describe the role of anaesthesiologists in providing such care.^[1]

The term was introduced 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] It describes the roles and competencies of anaesthesiologists and intensive care physicians in caring for patients with life-threatening illness or injury who require resuscitation or support of their vital functions, particularly in Scandinavia and other parts of Europe. One reason the term was introduced was to distinguish these core activities from the broader internationally recognised medical specialty of emergency medicine; the latter deals with the acute care of a broad range of minor to major medical problems that present to an emergency department,.^[1]

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 form part of postgraduate training for doctors specialising in anaesthesiology.^[3]