• education
• effectiveness
• emergency care systems
• emergency departments
• management

It is a bright summer day in 2014 and I am about to graduate in emergency medicine (EM). In front of me I see a radiant future for myself and for the discipline I chose to study 5 years earlier. I know that the road will not always be smooth, that I will have to overcome the scepticism of my future colleagues; but we are the first class of EM specialists in Italy, and finally, we have entered the contemporary era of medicine.

There are currently 28 European nations where EM is a primary specialty. The most recent is Spain, where the specialty started this year. In other countries, EM is a super-specialty that can be achieved at the end of one’s primary specialty path. In some European countries, the ‘struggle’ for the realisation of EM as autonomous specialty is still on. This is probably linked to the inhomogeneous economical levels of the different European states: many countries have come out of recent conflicts with neighbouring states, which have destroyed the social structure, such as some territories of the Balkan region, or some countries of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).1 2

EM originated in the Anglo-Saxon countries and is relatively recent even in some countries such …