The final hours of the program were dedicated to establishing research priorities for the burgeoning field of social emergency medicine. Conference organizers and others are actively distilling these themes and priorities into a summative chapter to accompany the conference proceedings in a publication.

Next Steps

Inventing Social Emergency Medicine was a beginning, meant to be a small group of people engaging in debate and discussion about an unformed area of inquiry and activism, one that is busy but lacks cohesion. That cohesion is what is changing, post-Dallas. Social emergency medicine is developing some internal logic of its own, and its principles and ideas are beginning to cohere. We invite any interested readers to join the Social Emergency Medicine Section or the Social Emergency Medicine Interest Group and roll up their sleeves in the creation of this maverick new field.

Dr. Alter is associate chair for research in the department of emergency medicine at Highland Hospital—Alameda Health System in Oakland, California, and executive director of the Andrew Levitt Center for Social Emergency Medicine