Explore the Emergency Room with an ER Doctor

About Dr. Craig Spencer

Dr. Craig Spencer’s medicinal mission is to heal people and squash diseases on a larger scale—the global kind. In fact, he’s helped sick people all over the world from the Caribbean to Central America, and even on a rescue boat in the Mediterranean. As the Director of Global Health in Emergency Medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, he gets to do things like make sure locals in Africa and Southeast Asia have access to medical care and human rights, study mortality and maternity health in Burundi, and coordinate the Ebola outbreak response in Guinea. Disease outbreaks—and breakthroughs—are his life’s blood.

About the class

TV and movies are fascinated by the chaos of an emergency room: ambulance sirens blaring, patients calling for help, doctors moving quickly and asking for everything “stat.” But to an ER doctor, the emergency room looks a lot different: it’s a place for analysis, decision making, and compassion. And as ER Doctor Craig Spencer says, “it’s an emergency room...we never say ‘stat’ because in the ER everyone already knows we need it stat.”

Join Dr. Spencer to learn what it’s like to be an emergency room doctor. You’ll pick up emergency medical vocabulary, find out why playing “20 Questions” is effective ER practice, play ER fact-vs.-fiction, and more. Best of all, in this action packed class you and Dr. Spencer will cover lots of medical ground, stat...but of course it’s the ER so you already knew that.