Acute medicine in the United Kingdom: First‐hand perspectives on a parallel evolution of inpatient medical care

Hospital medicine has emerged in the United States (US) to address the complexity of hospital care and over the last 15 years has become the fastest growing specialty in US history. The field has been shaped by societal, financial, and clinical factors within American health care, several of which also exist elsewhere in the world. Outside the US, analogs of hospital medicine have evolved; in the United Kingdom (UK), where the term and concept of a hospitalist is widely unknown, the specialty of acute medicine has evolved to meet the complex needs of the acutely unwell medical patient in the modern health care environment. The similarities are notable, as are the differences. Our objective in this brief communication is to introduce the UK model of acute medicine to counterparts in the US. We trace the development of acute medicine in the UK, describe current practice, and note features of the model potentially applicable to hospital medicine in the US. We use UK terminology but provide equivalent terms from the US, as shown in Table 1.