A decade at the front door of the hospital

Emergency medicine is unlike any other speciality in that the patient arrives before the diagnosis does. There is no referral letter, no prepared history, and frequently no way for the patient to explain what has happened. The clinician has to build a working picture from fragments — a blood pressure, a rhythm strip, the shape of someone's breathing — and act on it before certainty arrives.

Dr. Poonam Sekhon Chahal has practised in that setting for over ten years. She began at Dr. L. H. Hiranandani Hospital in Powai, Mumbai, in 2011, worked across occupational and outpatient medicine at SevenHills Healthcity, Rolta India and Apollo Polyclinic, and returned to Hiranandani to train formally in emergency medicine — first as a resident from 2019, then through a Master's in Emergency Medicine under the Society of Emergency Medicine, India.

That training culminated in a Certificate of Completion of Training in Emergency Medicine and a retrospective dissertation on 72-hour emergency department return visits — a study concerned less with dramatic saves than with the quieter question of what happens after a patient is sent home.

She now works as senior emergency physician in the emergency department at Manipal Hospital, Patiala, serving Patiala and the surrounding districts of Punjab. Her practice is built on protocol-driven care, point-of-care ultrasound at the bedside, and clear communication — with patients, with families, and with the teams who take over when the emergency phase is done.