ABSTRACT

Objective:

Department of Emergency Medicine was founded for the first time in the world in 1970 at Cincinnati University and in Turkey in 1993 at Dokuz Eylül and Fırat Universities. The emergency medicine specialists increased in number rapidly in Turkey by starting-up the training programs in the training and research hospitals of the Health Ministry for the first time in 2006; and participation of the doctors’ complete training program for the first time in 2011. We wanted the determine the preferability of the emergency medicine residency program and its completion rate.

Material and Methods:

The vacancies, preferability rate and completion rate of the residency programs of emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, cardiology and neurosurgery were investigated with this study. The data was derived from the web sites of the Student Selection and Placement Center and the assignment lot lists of the Health Ministry.

Results:

From 2007 to 2012, 2586 of 2767 emergency medicine vacancies were set. The minimum base -point was 53.03 and the maximum was 55.46 in the examination for specialty training in medicine (TUS). The preferability of emergency medicine was lower than internal medicine and cardiology but similar to neurosurgery and family medicine. The completion of the residency in emergency medicine was 66.1%.

Conclusion:

In spite of the increase in the number of emergency medicine specialists with the participation of the training and research hospitals, the completion rate of the residency programs were lower than other departments. The completion rates could be increased by improving the job conditions of the emergency physicians.