The First Ten Minutes: Mastering the Time-Critical Emergencies

Most of emergency medicine comes down to one skill: knowing what to do when time matters most.

Strip away the volume, the triage categories and the endless guidelines, and the core of the specialty is surprisingly small. A few dozen time-critical emergencies. The ones where the first ten minutes decide the outcome. Understand those properly and everything else in the department gets easier.

The First Ten Minutes is built on that idea. It distils UK emergency medicine down to the 35 emergencies that matter most — what is happening, what to do about it right now, in what order, and the mistake you are about to make. All built on current UK guidance (RCUK 2025, NICE, RCEM, BTS and more), with specific adult and paediatric doses.

Every emergency, the same six questions

• Recognise it — including the atypical presentations that get missed
• The first ten minutes — numbered actions, in sequence
• Drugs and doses — UK doses with the caveats that matter at the bedside
• Then what — disposition, escalation and definitive care
• Pitfalls — the recurring ways each presentation goes wrong in UK departments
• FRCEM/MRCEM exam traps — the thresholds and discriminators examiners test

What's covered

Resuscitation, cardiovascular, respiratory, neurological, metabolic and endocrine, toxicology, abdominal and surgical, paediatrics and obstetrics — from cardiac arrest and the failed airway to hyperkalaemia, paediatric DKA and obstetric haemorrhage.

• 350+ doses and numbers
• 90+ links to the primary guidelines
• Clickable contents — jump straight to the emergency you need

Who it's for

Anyone working in an emergency department who has to make time-critical decisions — consultants and registrars, SHOs and foundation doctors, ACPs, nurses and paramedics. It assumes clinical training and doesn't over-explain.

Read one emergency a day and in five weeks you've covered the time-critical core of UK emergency medicine. Read the exam traps alone and you've got a revision pass.

An educational resource, not a clinical protocol. Always check doses against the BNF and your local policies.

Instant PDF download. 74 pages.