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Emergency physician brings a wealth of experienceAfter having worked in emergency medicine for 26 years, Mark Rorem, MD, is uniquely qualified to talk about the evolution of that specialty over the last three decades. He has been an emergency medicine physician since he completed his residency in 1980. Rorem began working in the New Ulm Medical Center Emergency Department in early November. “When I first started in emergency medicine, it was a new specialty,” Rorem explained. In fact, board certification was not even available for emergency medicine physicians at that time. Board certification has since become available and Rorem is both board certified and a fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians. “It used to be that emergency rooms were covered by family practice physicians or internal medicine physicians who would be called away from whatever they were doing to attend to a patient in the emergency room,” Rorem said. “That is a difficult situation when you have an urgent case.” In many communities, emergency medicine has advanced to the point where there is always a physician available, Rorem said, so the physician is immediately available to care for critical patients. Rorem says he’s not an “adrenaline junky” but has always enjoyed the critical care portion of patient care. He enjoys the technical aspects of an acute situation. “While in medical school, I always seemed to gravitate towards emergency medicine.” After rotating through many areas of medicine during his residency, Rorem found that he enjoyed them all: orthopedics, general surgery, pediatrics, family-based care. But, he particularly enjoyed the acute care aspect of those specialties. “Emergency medicine is one of the areas of medicine in which a provider can have a broad base in acute care,” Rorem said. But, it’s not for everybody, he admitted. “There are certainly providers who don’t like the idea of taking care of people episodically and never having any follow up and possibly never any closure.” Of course, there are challenges that come along with this type of working environment. “You may have to leave a family after you’ve told them their loved one is dying and then deal with a patient who has an ear ache and is angry because they’ve been waiting forty minutes,” Rorem said. Those kinds of situations call for a special kind of flexibility. “You have to be able to let go of one patient and go on to the next one.” Rorem completed his residency at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, PA and moved back to Minnesota in 1989 to be closer to his roots in Appleton, MN. He worked as an emergency medicine physician at Immanuel St. Joseph’s Hospital in Mankato until coming to NUMC and was Director of Emergency Medicine at ISJ from 1989 to 1998. Rorem and his wife Nancy have a daughter, Amanda, who is a senior in high school and a son, Ben, who is in fourth grade. His wife works part time in the school system in Mankato. When not working in the emergency department, Rorem finds woodworking and building furniture a good way to relax. In the summer, he enjoys sailing on Battle Lake at a cabin owned by his extended family.  Back to Health Edition |
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New Ulm Medical Center
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