Medical Director

Within emergency medical services a medical director is a physician who provides guidance, leadership, oversight and quality assurance for the practice of local paramedics and EMTs within a predefined area. In North America, medical directors are typically board-certified in emergency medicine. The medical director is generally responsible for either the creation of protocols for treatment by paramedics or providing leadership to the group of physicians who assist with the provision of medical oversight depending on which model of service delivery and which model of medical control are operating. The medical director may also assist the EMS agency in extending its scope of practice. While this definition is a fair description of the role in North America, significant variations can occur in other countries and in other health care systems.

Note: In the interest of clarity, medical directors exist in a variety of other settings in addition to EMS. It is largely a generic term for a physician who has responsibility for the medical control and direction of various types of organizations, including hospital departments, blood banks, clinical teaching services and others. This article focuses specifically on the role of the medical director with respect to the operation of EMS systems.

Read more about Medical Director:  Notable Medical Directors

Famous quotes containing the words medical and/or director:

    Mark Twain didn’t psychoanalyze Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. Dickens didn’t put Oliver Twist on the couch because he was hungry! Good copy comes out of people, Johnny, not out of a lot of explanatory medical terms.
    Samuel Fuller (b. 1911)

    He wrote me sad Mother’s Day stories. He’d always kill me in the stories and tell me how bad he felt about it. It was enough to bring a tear to a mother’s eye.
    Connie Zastoupil, U.S. mother of Quentin Tarantino, director of film Pulp Fiction. Rolling Stone, p. 76 (December 29, 1994)