The European Society for Emergency Medicine (EUSEM), representing emergency medicine professionals across Europe, has issued a statement expressing its concern over the worsening humanitarian situation facing civilians and health workers in Gaza.

Read full statement here

One of the largest international surveys into job satisfaction among emergency department workers has revealed that while the majority found their work satisfying and rewarding, there are still many areas where improvements are needed, according to research presented at the EUSEM 2025- European Emergency Medicine Congress on 28 September 2025. The paper, “Global Job Satisfaction Among Emergency Medicine Professionals: Results from the 2025 Emergency Medicine Day Survey”, is published in the European Journal of Emergency Medicine. 

Read the paper here.

Read press release here.

2025 YEMD Chair & Co-chair election results

We can officially announce that Dr. Michela Cascio has been elected Chair of the YEMD section with 41 votes and Dr. Alessandra Iorfida has been elected Co-chair with 24 votes.

Many congratulations to both of them and to all the other candidates for standing in the election.

chair

We would like to announce the results of the 2025 elections for President Elect and Vice President.

Professor Christoph Dodt has been elected President with 276 votes and Professor Ashraf Butt has been elected Vice-President with 114 votes.

Many congratulations to them both.

president-elect

Vice Preisdent

Press Release: Neurological outcomes after patients suffer cardiac arrest at home are similar between low-and high-income areas in Vienna

Embargo: 00.01 hrs CEST on Wednesday 1 October 2025

Vienna, Austria: People who have a cardiac arrest in their own homes have similar neurological outcomes regardless of socioeconomic background, according to research presented at the European Emergency Medicine Congress today (Wednesday) [1].

However, the study of 676 patients who received treatment in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Medical University of Vienna suggested that those who lived in lower-income areas may be less likely to receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) from bystanders compared to people suffering a cardiac arrest (when the heart stops pumping blood around the body) in higher-income areas – a finding that the researchers say requires further studies to see whether it is a real effect.

The study was carried out by researchers led by Drs Jürgen Grafeneder and Christoph Schriefl at the Medical University of Vienna. They looked at outcomes for patients who experienced an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) and were treated in their emergency department between January 2020 and December 2022. They took data from the department’s CPR records, and looked at patients’ addresses, which they linked to electoral districts. These districts were then matched with the average household income for each area using data from Austria’s National Statistical System.

The researchers assessed neurological outcomes, such as brain damage and thinking ability, one, six and twelve months after the OHCA. They also investigated the association between these outcomes and household incomes, taking into account factors specific to each patient’s condition and any interventions or other treatments before they arrived at the hospital.

Ms Hannah Voith, a medical student at the Medical University of Vienna, presented the findings to the Congress. She said: “We found no significant association between patients’ income and neurological outcomes after an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. For cases that happened at the patient’s home address, we divided patients’ incomes into quartiles and examined basic life support rates from bystanders across the four groups. We observed a trend towards lower rates for patients in the bottom quartile with the lowest incomes  – 64% – compared to 78% for patients from the top quartile with the highest incomes, but this trend was not statistically significant.

“Even though this trend is not significant, it does suggest disparities in pre-hospital care in lower income areas, and underscores the importance of targeted public health interventions, such as expanding first aid training, to reduce inequities and improve survival after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Our analysis emphasises the complex relationship between social factors and emergency care outcomes, highlighting the importance of further research in this field.

“Multiple studies have established that early bystander-performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation significantly enhances both survival rates and favourable neurologic outcomes following out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.

“In addition, it is important to note that the group of patients we studied was pre-selected, as we only included patients who were admitted to the hospital. There is a high likelihood that patients who never received bystander basic life support did not enter our registry, because they died before reaching the hospital. Therefore, much of the effect of basic life support, or lack of it, would be ‘filtered out’ before our population was assembled and would not notably impact the neurologic outcomes we report.

“The results suggest that further research is needed to investigate bystander basic life support rates between varying income levels. This could help to promote basic life support training and awareness. Public health strategies that boost bystander readiness across all societal groups may help reduce disparities and improve outcomes. For policymakers, this involves investing in accessible, low-threshold education and training programmes.

She concluded: “To our knowledge, this is the first Austrian study to systematically examine the link between patients’ income and neurological outcomes after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. It is also unique in combining detailed registry data with geosocial analysis, providing new insights into regional variations in emergency response.”

While recognising that Vienna’s infrastructure and professional preclinical emergency care network are unique, the researchers say it would be helpful to see what happens in other large cities in Austria, such as Graz. In addition, they plan to evaluate bystander basic life support rates across Vienna, investigate long-term outcomes for patients, and for patients who have received extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation – a procedure that passes a patient’s blood supply through a machine to oxygenate the blood.

Strengths of the study include its use of a large, validated registry of OHCAs in Vienna, detailed socioeconomic information, and the focus on a clinically meaningful outcome: neurological survival. Limitations include the fact that the study was observational, socioeconomic data were based on geographic area rather than on information for individual patients, and infrastructural factors, such as proximity to specialised care centres such as Vienna General Hospital, may have influenced outcomes but were not fully accounted for in the analysis.

Dr Felix Lorang is a member of the EUSEM abstract selection committee. He is head of the emergency department at SRH Zentralklinikum Suhl, Thuringia, Germany, and was not involved with the research. He said: “These findings suggest that if someone survives an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and can be discharged from hospital, then their neurological outcomes are not affected by their socioeconomic background. We already know that the most important intervention on the way to a favourable neurological outcome is bystander CPR. However, the trend the researchers observed towards lower CPR rates in lower-income areas of Vienna definitely deserves further investigation. More education and training of people everywhere, not just in Vienna, is needed to try to improve the numbers who can offer CPR in an emergency.”

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[1] Abstract no: OA023, “The impact of socioeconomic factors on the outcome in adult out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients – a retrospective data analysis”, by Hannah Voith. Cardio-respiratory session, Wednesday 1 October, 09:00-10:30 hrs CEST, Schubert 4.

Funding: The study was funded by the Medial Scientific Fund of the Mayor of the City of Vienna.

PRESS RELEASE: Doctors and nurses are better than AI at triaging patients

Embargo: 18.00 hrs CEST on Tuesday 30 September 2025

Vienna, Austria: Doctors and nurses are better at triaging patients in emergency departments than artificial intelligence (AI), according to research presented at the European Emergency Medicine Congress today (Tuesday) [1].

However, Dr Renata Jukneviciene, a postdoctoral researcher at Vilnius University, Lithuania, who presented the study, said that AI could be useful when used in conjunction with clinical staff, but should not be used as a stand-alone triage tool.

“We conducted this study to address the growing issue of overcrowding in the emergency department and the escalating workload of nurses,” said Dr Jukneviciene. “Given the rapid development of AI tools like ChatGPT, we aimed to explore whether AI could support triage decision-making, improve efficiency and reduce the burden on staff in emergency settings.”

The researchers distributed a paper and digital questionnaire to six emergency medicine doctors and 51 nurses working in the emergency department of Vilnius University Hospital Santaros Klinikos. They asked them to triage clinical cases selected randomly from 110 reports cited in the PubMed database on the internet. The clinical staff were required to classify the patients according to urgency, placing them in one of five categories from most to least urgent, using the Manchester Triage System. The same cases were analysed by ChatGPT (version 3.5).

A total of 44 nurses (86.3%) and six doctors (100%) completed the questionnaire.

“Overall, AI underperformed compared to both nurses and doctors across most of the metrics we measured,” said Dr Jukneviciene. “For example, AI’s overall accuracy was 50.4%, compared to 65.5% for nurses and 70.6% for doctors. Sensitivity – how well it identified true urgent cases – for AI was also lower at 58.3% compared to nurses, who scored 73.8%, and doctors, who scored 83.0%.”

Doctors had the highest scores in all the areas and categories of urgency that the researchers analysed.

“However, AI did outperform nurses in the first triage category, which are the most urgent cases; it showed better accuracy and specificity, meaning that it identified the truly life-threatening cases. For accuracy, AI scored 27.3% compared to 9.3% for nurses, and for the specificity AI scored 27.8% versus 8.3%.”

The distribution of cases across the five categories of urgency was as follows:

“These results suggest that while AI generally tends to over-triage, it may be somewhat more cautious in flagging critical cases, which can be both a strength and a drawback,” said Dr Jukneviciene.

Doctors also performed better than AI when considering cases that required or involved surgery, and in cases that required treatment with medication or other non-invasive therapies. For surgical cases, doctors scored 68.4%, nurses scored 63.% and AI scored 39.5% for reliability. For therapeutic cases, doctors scored 65.9%, nurses scored 44.5% and AI did better than nurses, scoring 51.9% for reliability.

“While we anticipated that AI might not outperform experienced clinicians and nurses, we were surprised that in some areas AI performed quite well. In fact,in the most urgent triage category, it demonstrated higher accuracy than nurses. This indicates that AI should not replace clinical judgement, but could serve as a decision-support tool in specific clinical contexts and in overwhelmed emergency departments.

“AI may assist in prioritising the most urgent cases more consistently and in supporting new or less experienced staff. However, excessive triaging could lead to inefficiencies, so careful integration and human oversight are crucial. Hospitals should approach AI implementation with caution and focus on training staff to critically interpret AI suggestions,” concluded Dr Jukneviciene.

The researchers are planning follow-up studies using newer versions of AI and AI models that are fine-tuned for medical purposes. They want to test them in larger groups of participants, include ECG interpretation, and explore how AI can be integrated into nurse training, specifically for triage and incidents involving mass casualties.

Limitations of the study include its small numbers, that it took place in a single centre, and that the AI analysis took place outside a real-time hospital setting, so it was not possible to assess how it could be used in the daily workflow; nor was it possible to interact with patients, assess vital signs and have follow-up data. In addition, ChatGPT 3.5 was not trained specifically for medical use.

Strengths of the study were that it used real clinical cases for comparison by a multidisciplinary group of doctors and nurses, as well as AI; its accessibility and flexibility was increased by distributing the questionnaire digitally and on paper; it was clinically relevant to current healthcare challenges such as overcrowding and staff shortages in the emergency department; and the study identified that AI over-triages many patients, assigning higher urgency to them, which is crucial knowledge for the safe implementation of AI in emergency departments.

Dr Barbra Backus is chair of the EUSEM abstract selection committee. She is an emergency physician in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and was not involved in the study. She said: “AI has the potential to be a useful tool for many aspects of medical care and it is already proving its worth in areas such as interpreting x-rays. However, it has its limitations, and this study shows very clearly that it cannot replace trained medical staff for triaging patients coming in to emergency departments. This does not mean it should not be used, as it could aid in speeding up decision-making. However, it needs to be applied with caution and with oversight from doctors and nurses. I expect AI will improve in the future, but should be tested at every stage of development.”

On Monday 29 September, a colleague of Dr Jukneviciene’s, assistant professor Rakesh Jalali, from the University of Warmia and Mazury (Olsztyn, Poland), gave a presentation at the congress on the use of virtual reality to train clinical staff how to treat patients who have been subject to multiple traumatic injuries [2].

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[1] Abstract no: OA008, “Patient triaging in the ED: can artificial intelligence become the gold standard?” by Renata Jukneviciene, AI/Innovations session, Tuesday 30 September, 16:45-18:15 hrs CEST, Schubert 5 room.

[2] ‘Enhancing medical simulation training: multicenter MedEd polytrauma VR project’, by Rakesh Jalali, Multinational-multicentric research projects in 2025 session, Monday 29 September, 16:45-18:15 hrs CEST, Strauss 1 room.

Funding: The study received no funding.