A new EM journal?

Editorials / Commentaries

CJEM 1999;1(1):17

Another emergency medicine journal? There are scads already! Some arrive even if you don't subscribe. CAEP has already tried this. Remember the CAEP Review from the early '80s? It wasn't just the lousy name. Canada is too small; Canadian emerg docs are too busy to write. And what about the trees?

Canadians are a modest bunch and reasonably so. Our country is big on land but short on people. We're part of the G8, and rich, but we're hardly an economic dynamo. We don't have a long history like the Greeks or Italians. We never conquered half the world like the British or French, and our military might limits us to picking off the odd stray Spanish fishing trawler. We are polite and culturally sensitive. Step out of the country and try to find any evidence of intelligent life emanating from that big, pink smudge on the globe that separates the US from Santa. Only environmental catastrophes and Quebec separatists bring Canada international notice.

Of course, Canada is just a well kept secret. We continually top the United Nations' annual list of best countries in the world to live. Even without the benefit of the CRTC, radio stations around the world blast out the tunes of Céline Dion, Bryan Adams, Alanis Morissette and Shania Twain - all naturally assumed to be American. That impossible, underfunded health care system that Canadian physicians love to hate is actually the envy of much of the rest of the world.

Pick up your favourite US emergency medicine journal and flip through the list of contributors. Quite a few Canadians, eh? Our emergency medicine scholars deserve more recognition than they receive. We are the second oldest established EM specialty in the world and one of the four founding members of the International Federation of Emergency Medicine. The Canadian contribution to the world literature in emergency medicine vastly exceeds our humble size.

But do we really need another EM journal? The truth is, of 3330 journals listed in Index Medicus, only 12 deal with emergency medicine and 2 of these are published in German. Of the 10 English-language journals, 3 are from the UK and 7 from the US. Three of these journals deal specifically with the subspecialty areas of disaster medicine and pediatric emergency medicine.

The Canadian health care system is unique, and, as we all know, emergency medicine is what keeps it going. EM has global generic challenges, but Canadian EM's specific strengths, problems and solutions are distinctly different from those of the rest of the world. Funding for our system is like no other. Does reading about the threats of managed care make your eyes glaze over? We don't have COBRAs stalking us in the ED, but we do have our own demons: the "dump" and "no beds" species, to name but two.

... of 3330 journals listed in Index Medicus, only 12 deal with emergency medicine ...

Try convincing a US emergency physician that quality assurance is about improving patient care and not about saving malpractice premiums. And we're not only different from Americans; try discussing the value of the CCFP(EM) with an Australian or a Scot. Our gentle multicultural mix of citizens rarely provides us the excuse for a thoracotomy, but flying home from anywhere can bring us in contact with just about any disease or condition known to man.

Canadian emergency physicians will keep publishing in the global press, helping to sell magazines and remedies for their advertisers. But it's time now to have the option of publishing in Canada and to share the Canadian EM experience with the world beyond. We need a Canadian journal of emergency medicine.