EM Mindset: Sergey Motov – Complex & Dynamic

Author: Sergey Motov (Assistant Professor of EM, Maimonides Medical Center – @smotovmd) // Editors: Alex Koyfman, MD (@EMHighAK) and Manpreet Singh, MD (@MPrizzleER)

The mindset of an Emergency Medicine Doctor is a complex and dynamic combination of algorithms, facts, assumptions, and notions that are founded upon knowledge and experience (evidence-based or “gut” feeling) and affected by emotions, beliefs, and working environment. ED doctors are unique in their ability to multitask, to think on their feet, to process enormous amounts of limited information in a very short time and to take care of patients, their families, as well as other health care professionals in the ED. What is it that makes ED doctors so unique? What is the defining feature of this type of mindset? There are lots of characteristics that easily fit into the category of specialty-defining skills: intellectual maturity, great cognitive abilities, mental toughness and perseverance, resilience, emotional control, superb technicality and ambidexterity, enormous compassion and sensitivity.

However, based on my 12 years of experience working in the ED, I believe that the EM specialty and mindset defining skill is the ability to make a call/decision and to stand by it and, even more importantly, to deal and to live with it.

If you are interested in reading the rest of this and other EM Mindset pieces, please see “An Emergency Medicine Mindset,” a collection evaluating the thought process of emergency physicians. This book is available as ebook and print on Amazon.