Caregivers and families
Parents and guardians looking after a child who has been hurt or has suddenly fallen ill — what to do at home, and when a hospital is needed.
About Us
We close the gap.
Between someone who suddenly falls ill and the people who could help, there is a gap the system never filled. EM-I-CLEAR is an independent nonprofit that closes it from both sides.
A public-benefit
health education nonprofit.
Who we are
EM-I-CLEAR is an independent nonprofit association in the Republic of Korea, registered with the National Tax Service as 응급의학혁신교육연구회 under Unique Registration Number 614-82-76493. What we produce is health education for the public. Everything we publish is free to read, and we distribute no profit of any kind.
Who we write for
Immigrant and multicultural families living in Korea
Language is one of the widest gaps between a family and the care they need. A caregiver who cannot read Korean is left with less information at the moment it matters most, and that is one of the gaps we exist to close.
So we publish in English as well as Korean, written for life in Korea — the same 119, the same emergency departments, the same neighborhood clinics. The English edition is not a shortened version; it is the same guidance. Where another language is needed, we provide a reviewed translation on request.
Teachers and the general public
First aid, how to recognize an urgent condition, and when emergency care is the right call.
Clinicians and trainees
The people who care for them, so that what a family is told at home and what happens at the hospital rest on the same evidence.
What we are not
We do not provide clinical care
We do not operate a hospital or a clinic, and we do not treat patients or prescribe. We are not a healthcare provider and not part of any healthcare system. What we produce is educational material, research, and tools.
We are not a school
We are not a university, an academic institution or a school foundation, and we are not part of or affiliated with one. We award no degrees or qualifications and enroll no students.
We belong to no one
We are not owned by, and do not speak for, any hospital, company or government body. We sell nothing and we carry no advertising.
The same night,
inside and out.
The problem we see
Two in the morning. The emergency department phone does not stop. Ambulance crews across the country are calling to ask whether the department can accept a patient.
It is not that nobody wants to take them. A single operation needs an open operating room, an anesthesiologist and a surgical team, all at the same time. Someone has to admit the patient afterward. An intensive care bed has to be free. None of that can be supplied by one doctor, however hard they try.
From outside the hospital, none of this is visible. The child is crying and in pain, no one will take them, and the fear that no one is going to treat them fills the wait. Why something that used to work no longer does, and what changed in between, there is no way to know.
No one did anything wrong.
The system that should connect one person to another has stopped working. That is where the gap opened.
We are
on the same side.
How we see it
Wanting to be seen quickly and wanting to treat properly are not opposing wishes. Both sides want the same thing — fewer people falling ill, and those who do treated in time.
The system simply does not guarantee it. Wherever it fails to, a gap opens, and people are hurt in it.
We stand in that gap. We stay where the tears collect, and we close the distance.
Our approach
One step,
from each side.
Clinicians
What closes the gap
Education · Technology
The public
Education — toward the patient
We train residents and medical students. Repeated simulation builds clinical judgment, and afterward we look back together at the decisions made and at how the team communicated. Capacity only grows when the number of people who can provide care grows.
Technology — toward the provider
We help people take stock of their own condition and put it into the language of medicine. We work out with them whether this is a moment that needs a clinician, and walk through the first aid a bystander can give when minutes matter.
We rebuild communication and relationship,
and build trust on top of it.
What
we do.
Activities
Educating providersIn progress
There are not enough people to cover emergency and pediatric care. We run simulation-based clinical education for residents and medical students, and we build the simulated record system and the teaching materials ourselves.
Emergency decision supportIn development
Describe what is wrong in your own words. The tool asks follow-up questions the way a clinical interview does, sets out the key symptoms and how they have changed, and tells you whether this looks urgent. Where it is needed, it walks through the first aid that can be given at home and points to the nearest emergency department.
Educating the publicPlanned
We create resources so that citizens, caregivers and teachers can look after their own health and the health of the people beside them. The format and the depth change with who is reading.
Research — AI and machine learning
Our research centers on artificial intelligence and machine learning. This is not the first such attempt. We do it because this is the fastest way to cover the gaps where people are missing. Questions from the field become research, and what we find goes back into our teaching and our tools.
Where the gap
is widest.
Our priority
When no hospital can accept a patient, children and adolescents are turned away first.
They cannot explain their own symptoms, and they are harder to treat. Yet the reimbursement is lower and the legal exposure higher, so fewer clinicians are willing to take them on. This is not an individual failing. It is how the structure is built.
This is where the gap has opened widest. This is where we start.
Children
They are hurt most often and ill most often, and least able to say what is wrong. It is also when caregivers worry most.
For children we make what children actually watch — animation and comics — about how not to get hurt.
For caregivers we cover what to worry about, which signs to watch closely, and when a trip to the emergency department is not optional. We also cover child-rearing and developmental health more broadly.
Adolescents
At this age the central issue is mental health. Suicidal thoughts and intentional overdose are among the main reasons this age group reaches an emergency department.
We are working on self-assessment tools for mental health and on digital therapeutics. And for the urgent moment — when you, or a friend, have swallowed something — what to do right now.
Adolescents can read and understand this material directly. For those who want to do research with us, we study alongside them and help them take it further from where they are.
What we have
not done yet.
Plainly
We say plainly what we have not done yet. On this site, work that is still at the planning stage is labeled as planned.
Everything we publish is free to read. Educational material is released under an open license so that it can be shared at no cost, and we publish it under the name of the organization rather than any individual.