The term prehospital emergency medicine is widely used to describe field-based emergency care. While it accurately identifies a core clinical domain, it is often used interchangeably with emergency medical services (EMS), which encompass a wider range of clinical, organisational, and system-level functions. This conflation may obscure the scope of contemporary out-of-hospital practice. A substantial proportion of EMS encounters do not result in hospital transport, and in many systems the decision not to transport is itself a key outcome. In low- and middle-income countries, care delivered outside hospital settings may be the most definitive care a patient receives, challenging a purely “prehospital” framing. Field-based care operates in a distinct environment at the intersection of emergency medicine and primary care, and health systems across countries and income levels have adopted different terminology to reflect this breadth. Terms such as territorial emergency medicine or out-of-hospital emergency care illustrate alternative ways of conceptualising this field beyond a “prehospital” perspective. A more precise and internationally shared terminology may better reflect contemporary practice and support clearer communication across systems.
Capitanio et al. (Fri,) studied this question.