Emergency room
doctors must earn bachelor and medical degrees.
Preparing to become an emergency room (ER) doctor begins as early as the undergraduate college years. Aspiring ER doctors obtain a four-year undergraduate degree before pursuing their graduate medical school education. These future doctors can choose from a range of degree fields and single or joint degree programs to reach their goal of working in an emergency room.
Bachelor's Degree
Medical school applicants have to complete a bachelor's degree from an accredited institution, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine. Therefore, aspiring ER doctors first should complete their undergraduate curriculum at a competitive school to gain admissions into medical school. Although medical schools do not require applicants to earn a degree in a specific field, many aspiring doctors focus on a few undergraduate fields of study. For example, Mississippi College reports that biology is the most popular major among aspiring medical students. Other popular majors of medical school applicants included chemistry and physics. Majoring in the sciences benefits future ER doctors because it helps them complete prerequisite courses for medical school.
Medical Degree
Earning a medical degree is the required graduate degree for emergency room doctors. This four-year program begins with coursework and concludes with medical students receiving clinical exposure. As they work toward the medical degree, students will take courses like cellular structure and function, neurosciences and mechanisms of disease and treatment, according to the University of Kentucky College of Medicine. During their third and fourth years, as students see medicine from the clinical perspective, they can take clinical rotations or internships in emergency medicine, which can prepare them for a residency in the field. However, medical school clinical experience touches on all types of medicine, so even aspiring ER doctors will have to work in other fields like obstetrics and gynecology.
Additional Training
After they complete medical school, ER doctors complete an emergency medicine residency program. This program, which lasts for three or four years, depending on the school, exposes doctors to emergency medicine in a hands-on, clinical environment. For example, the University of Chicago's three-year emergency medicine residency program rotates residents through critical care areas like pediatrics, intensive care, cardiology and neonatal. Brown University emergency medicine residents work through rotations like obstetrics and gynecology, plastic surgery and trauma.
After successful completion of the emergency medicine residency, ER doctors must complete an application to take the qualifying exam through the American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM), which takes place annually in October or November, as of 2010. Once they pass the qualifying exam, they must complete two oral certification exams in the calendar year following successful completion of the qualifying exam. When complete, the ER doctor earns certification through the ABEM.
Tags: emergency medicine, medical school, emergency medicine residency, emergency room, medicine residency, qualifying exam