**香港急症科醫學院 **

In Hong Kong, Emergency Medicine (EM) service is basically monopolized by government through the fifteen Accident and Emergency Departments (AEDs) under the Hospital Authority. The traditional hospital service budget will only provide marginal resource to maintain the service, and there was little provision for training or specialty development.

After being admitted as one of the fifteen constituent colleges of the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine (HKAM) in 1997, under the able leadership of our past presidents, Dr. Chin-hung Chung and Dr. Tai-wai Wong, fellows of the College united with continuous effort to gain recognition and respect from other medical colleagues. The exemplary success of the AED doctors in fighting against SARS and other infectious diseases further strengthen our role in the health care system of Hong Kong . We seemed to have started this initial phase of the EM development in Hong Kong quite well. However, comparing with other countries, we are still far lagging behind in development. In the States, Emergency Physicians (EP) have subspecialized in areas such as resuscitation, traumatology, paediatric emergency medicine, toxicology, ultrasonography, sports medicine, forensic emergency medicine and pre-hospital care. In Hong Kong, we have yet to establish our own subspecialty, but we have organized various structured training courses in Basic and Advanced Cardiac Life Support, Paediatric courses and Advanced Life Support Courses in Obstetrics. We have also successfully introduced the Toxicology courses into Hong Kong and assisted in the establishment of the Hong Kong Poison Information Centre (HKPIC), with our Fellow, Dr. Fei-lung Lau appointed as the Director of HKPIC. It is expected that more advanced toxicology training will be established in collaboration with HKPIC. Along the line of subspecialization, several interest groups were formed within the College and various courses have been started in the past few years, namely, Forensic Medicine, Sports Medicine, Evidence Based Medicine and Ultrasonography. At present all of them are in the initial phase and future development will need concerted effort from Fellows and Trainees.