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DOI:10.1097/MCC.0000000000000563 Welcome to the Emergencies in Critical Care issue in Current Opinion in Critical Care. This issue focuses on key topics that live within the domain of clinical medicine at the intersection of emergency medicine and critical care medicine – that is, topics relevant to providers caring for acutely and severely ill patients from the prehospital phase of resuscitation through the emergency department and into the early phase of management in the ICU. Advances in clinical medicine can come in many different forms. Such advances from the invention of new technologies and the development of new pharmaceuticals are frequently celebrated (as they should be). However, learning how to use existing tools better is also essential to improving clinical care, and frequently can have a larger impact than a new technology or drug. For example, oxygen therapy, intravenous fluids, endotracheal intubation, and assisted ventilation have been cornerstones of acute resuscitation for many decades, and at times seem mundane in a world of molecular diagnostics and genetic medicine. Yet, despite being delivered to millions of patients every year around the world, we continue to learn how to administer these core therapies better. This issue focuses on recent advances in everyday clinical care using tools already available in most emergency departments and ICUs. International experts review recently published data on four of the most commonly used treatments (oxygen, intravenous fluids, noninvasive ventilation, and intubation) and two of the most commonly encountered illnesses (pneumonia and pulmonary embolism) in the emergency department and ICU. As outlined in the article by Frei and Young (pp. 506–511), oxygen has been used to treat patients since the 18th century. Yet, only recently have the risks of overzealous oxygen use and hyperoxia been widely appreciated. Increasing evidence supports the use of oxygen therapy only to prevent hypoxia and not to drive oxygen to supraphysiologic levels in patients without hypoxia [1,2]. As reviewed by Casey et al. (pp. 512–518), saline (0.9% sodium chloride) has been one of the most common therapies administered to hospitalized patients for over a