From the Latin Urgencia, urgency refers to the quality of urgency (which requests, requests or requires immediate attention). An emergency is something that needs to be dealt with right away. For example: “Please help me, I have an emergency: my son has just hit his head on the floor”, “I would like to talk to you, but I have to go to the office urgently or my boss fires me”, “I have to go to the bathroom urgently or I will have an accident.”
An emergency implies a pressing need or situation that requires immediate attention. The concept is often associated with health problems: when a person is at risk of death, they face an emergency (and doctors must respond quickly). On the other hand, if the health problem does not require immediate attention, the situation changes.
The distinction between the two cases is easy to understand. A person who is hit by a car and suffers a head injury requires urgent medical attention (every minute that goes by without attention increases the risk of death). On the other hand, if a person is hit by a bicycle and only suffers a scratch on his knee, he is not facing an emergency, even if he needs some kind of medical attention. Precisely from this point of view, it should be noted that in the different hospitals there is an emergency area, where all patients are treated, both at the time of damage or pathology, and due to the seriousness of the situation. in fact, they need medical care outside of consultation services. Precisely one of the most important television series of recent decades is “Emergencies”. It was an American production that was broadcast from 1994 to 2009 and that came to tell how people work every day in the emergency room of a Chicago hospital. The imaginary General Hospital of the Municipality was precisely the stage where the plots of this television space were developed, which allowed us to learn from the most unique diseases to the problems of current medicine, passing through the lives of patients and doctors and nurses that they worked there. The famous actor George Clooney was one of the protagonists of this series that gave him the great impulse and projection that his career needed. In addition to all this, it should be noted that there is also what is known as emergency contraception. This, as its name suggests, is the one that is taken after sexual intercourse and is considered risky because it may have caused the woman to become pregnant. A clear example of this would be the so-called morning after pill. Emergency decrees are those that are issued, as the name suggests, for reasons of urgency. These norms, sanctioned by the Executive Branch, are valid as a law, although they must be approved by the Legislature to become effective.
