Dr. Brent King Returns to UT-H to Head Program
UT Emergency Med Gets Accreditation

The University of Texas-Houston Medical School's emergency medicine department has received provisional accreditation from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. UT-Houston's department of emergency medicine is the only such program in south Texas.

Dr. Brent King is the department's chairman. He's been at the helm just 10 months, but he has deep roots both in UT-Houston and in emergency medicine.

"Any kind of patient can walk into - or be brought to - an emergency center," says Dr. King. "Heart cases, altered mental status, injuries, minor illnesses and major illnesses that may appear at first to be minor. In many cases, the patient won't be able to communicate. It is critical that the emergency room physician has the ability to quickly and accurately diagnose," says Dr. King.

Dr. King believes that the three-year emergency medicine residency training of his department prepares ER doctors very well - "Especially in the community hospital setting," he adds. There are 24 interns in the program.

There are, essentially, two methods of medically staffing an emergency center, Dr. King explains. In one kind of emergency center, there will be two departments - medicine and surgery. The medicine side of the emergency center will see those cases that are not penetrating or blunt injuries - heart attacks, respiratory distress or seizures, for example. The other side of the emergency center will see patients who have been in a motor vehicle accident, fall, shot or stabbed - patients who will need surgical intervention. This is the way that Ben Taub General Hospital's emergency center (one of the two Level 1 emergency centers in Houston) is set up: it is staffed by Baylor College of Medicine's faculty from the departments of surgery and medicine, and there is a director for each service.

Houston's other Level 1 emergency center is at Memorial Hermann Hospital, and it is the primary site for UT-Houston's emergency medicine residency program. Twelve full-time and four part-time faculty oversee the residents' training. Dr. Carolyn Galloway is the director of the Memorial Hermann Emergency Center. ("The new expanded emergency area at Hermann helped us with the re-accreditation," says Dr. King. "The previous space was thought to be inadequate for the residency program.") In 1998, there were over 48,000 emergency cases at the Hermann emergency center.

The next step for the program will be to move from provisional to full accreditation within five years. "Hopefully in three years when we are scheduled to be reviewed," says Dr. King. The program is able to participate in the residency matching program. "There is a real breadth in our emergency medicine program. Residents spend a good deal of time in radiology, pediatrics, psychiatry, internal medicine and surgery," says Dr. King. "There may not be the depth in certain specific areas - that a fourth year surgical resident might have, for example - but our people will have that broad depth."

Dr. King and most emergency medicine faculty see another difference in some emergency centers: community hospitals don't typically have the needs of an urban Level 1 emergency center. And community hospitals simply could not afford to staff an emergency center with specialists in all areas, as a Level 1 must do.

"An emergency medicine specialist is very efficient for the hospital," says Dr. King. "Most of our people will go to community hospitals. In a small community, in the middle of the night, he or she might be the only doctor in the hospital. Or the only doc within many miles. They will need to know a lot, across a broad spectrum of care, and they will need to call in specialists with certain skills when necessary."

Dr. King received his M.D. from UT-Houston in 1983. He received undergraduate degrees in microbiology and psychology from Texas Tech University. For 15 years, Dr. King divided his time between Houston and Philadelphia, being at UT-Houston when the emergency medicine program began in 1990, and at Philadelphia's Medical College of Pennsylvania/Hahnemann University until assuming the chairmanship of UT-Houston program in 1998. The UT-Houston program is one of the newest of the country's 122 emergency medicine residency programs.

"Emergency medicine training is very `big' in the Northeast, North and in California," says Dr. King. "It's been a little slow to catch on in the South." In Philadelphia, all five medical schools - Thomas Jefferson University, the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, Medical College of Pennsylvania/Hahnemann University School of Medicine and Albert Einstein Medical Center - have emergency medicine residency training programs. Additionally, there are programs just outside Philadelphia, in Camden, New Jersey; Wilmington, Del.; and Allentown, Bethlehem and Hersey, Penn. By contrast there are only four programs in Texas - at UT-Houston, Texas Tech in Lubbock, UT Southwest in Dallas and Scott and White in Temple. (There are two military emergency medicine training programs in Texas, the Air Force's in San Antonio and the Army's at Fort Hood.)

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©2006 Texas Medical Center

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