Tuscan Emergency Medicine Initiative

Overview
The Tuscan Emergency Medicine Initiative (TEMI) is a collaborative effort between American emergency physicians from Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Tuscan Ministry of Health to create standardized training in emergency medicine for that region. As of September 2007, the program has trained more than 450 Tuscan emergency physicians, and may serve as the model for future training programs elsewhere in the world. A detailed description of the program appears in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

Italy lacks standardized specialty training in emergency medicine, leading to variability of emergency medical care delivery not only between hospital emergency departments, but also within individual emergency departments. The Tuscan Minister of Health sought to develop a partnership with emergency medicine specialists from the United States to help expedite the growth of the specialty in Tuscany. The collaboration involved the regional healthcare service, the Tuscan university system, Harvard Medical International and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Administrators combined the emergency medicine training curricula from the European Society of Emergency Medicine and the American Board of Emergency Medicine into a “Train-the-Trainers” course, qualification track and Master’s degree program.

TEMI has three objectives: to train future emergency medicine educators, to qualify all physicians working in regional hospital emergency departments and to start a regional university emergency medicine master’s program as a future bridge to emergency medicine specialty training.