Mizzou Creating Emergency Medicine Residency

The university's School of Medicine plans to recruit six to eight residents for the program's first class. It is to begin training those physicians next July.

Residency programs provide clinical training for physicians after they graduate from medical school. The Missouri program was granted approval last month from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.

Marc Borenstein is the chairman of the medical school's Department of Emergency Medicine. He says most emergency room doctors historically were trained in other specialties like internal or family medicine. But he says specialized training in emergency medicine has become more important as technology has advanced.