Emergency medicine is the specialty built for the unpredictable—managing everything from minor injuries and pediatric fevers to trauma activations, cardiac arrest, stroke, and sepsis. The door is always open, and someone has to be there.
More than 150 million emergency department visits occur annually in the United States.
Locum tenens in emergency medicine means you’re not waiting for the right opportunity — you’re building it. Choose when you work, where you go, and what comes next. Barton coordinates licensing, credentialing, travel, and onboarding so you can focus on the work.
Pediatric emergency medicine (PEM) is a fellowship-trained subspecialty focused on the acute care of ill and injured children — covering neonatal resuscitation, pediatric trauma, respiratory distress, and seizure management in dedicated pediatric EDs, children’s hospitals, and pediatric trauma centers. Certification requirements and clinical scope are meaningfully distinct from general EM, and compensation reflects both the additional training and limited supply of fellowship-trained PEM physicians.
In rural and critical access hospitals, family medicine physicians with emergency medicine experience play an important role in maintaining emergency department coverage. Many of these facilities rely on family medicine-trained clinicians to care for patients in the ED, and Barton places board-certified family physicians in emergency medicine roles where facility requirements and state regulations allow.
EM locum compensation is driven by shift structure, volume, and setting. Rural and critical access assignments consistently command higher hourly rates than urban or suburban EDs — demand is high, providers are thin, and coverage is often solo. Pediatric EM and overnight shifts carry additional premium across most markets.
When an EM shift goes uncovered, there is no fallback. The department runs short, patients wait longer, and the clinicians who show up absorb the load. Barton fixes the friction, not just the vacancy.
Clinicians matched on board certification, procedural scope, setting type, volume tolerance, and licensing — aligned to your patient population, acuity level, and coverage model. A solo overnight at a critical access hospital and a day shift in a high-volume Level I trauma center require different clinicians. Every placement is built around that distinction.
Qualified emergency medicine physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants submitted in under five days, not five weeks.
Barton manages licensing, credentialing, and onboarding end to end — including ABEM/AOBEM board certification verification, ATLS/ACLS/PALS confirmation, and emergency privileging pathways where applicable. One partner, start to finish.
The EM workforce story is not a national shortage — it’s a geographic one. A 2025 peer-reviewed study published in the ACEP Journal found that 7.4% of U.S. emergency departments lack 24/7 attending physician coverage, with 89% of those being critical access or low-volume rural hospitals.
For facilities in those markets, locum coverage is frequently the difference between keeping the department open and boarding patients for transfer. For clinicians, it means consistent demand and flexibility — rural and critical access assignments command the strongest rates, and the need is structural, not cyclical
With a nationwide network of emergency medicine professionals and a specialty-focused matching approach, Barton handles everything from first match through final shift — licensing, credentialing support, deployment, and ongoing coordination — without friction or delay.
Emergency medicine often intersects with adjacent acute care and surgical disciplines. If your needs span multiple specialties or fall outside what’s listed here, we can help with that too.
Whether you’re stepping into a role or filling one, Barton gets you there faster — with the right fit from the start.
12 high-demand specialties and 149 subspecialties.
