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SPECIALTIES
Emergency Medicine
Training in emergency medicine in the UK — from medical school exposure to specialty training and the FRCEM.
Emergency medicine in the UK is a six-year specialty training programme leading to a Certificate of Completion of Training (CCT) in emergency medicine. After completing the Foundation Programme, trainees enter ACCS-EM (Acute Care Common Stem — Emergency Medicine) for three years (covering emergency medicine, acute medicine, anaesthesia/ICM, and paediatric emergency medicine) before progressing to higher specialty training. The postgraduate exam sequence is the FRCEM (Fellowship of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine), comprising the Primary, Intermediate SAQ and OSCE, and Final examinations.
Medical students typically encounter emergency medicine in a single rotation during the clinical years. Beyond placements, exposure usually comes through student-selected components, voluntary shadowing, or membership of student emergency medicine societies. EMTA (the Emergency Medicine Trainees Association) and the RCEM Student membership tier are useful for students considering the specialty.
The specialty is one of the most competitive at the point of entry to higher training and has been one of the most affected by workforce shortages and changes to working patterns over the past decade.
Current authoritative resources
About this page
This page is one of a set of medical school and medical careers resources on chrispaton.org, replacing the category landings of New Media Medicine (newmediamedicine.com), an early digital health blog and UK medical school applications community I ran between 2004 and 2014. The original New Media Medicine forum threads — user-generated content from that community — are not republished here; this is original framing written to help current applicants find authoritative information. Always confirm details with the official sources linked above before acting on them.