Department of Emergency Medicine
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Chairman's MessageThe Department of Emergency Medicine gained full academic status in 1994, and I was fortunate to be chosen as its first Chairman. During the past 12 years a great deal of clinical, educational, and academic development has occurred, and our growth and evolution continues. The mission of our Department is similar to that of the School of Medicine. We are dedicated to excellence in patient care and service, education of medical professionals on all levels, community service, and research vectored to understand and help solve major acute clinical and health services-related problems Our clinical program provides care for approximately 400,000 patient visits per year. We are currently staffing seven clinical sites. These include: The Mount Sinai Hospital, Elmhurst Hospital Center, The Mount Sinai Hospital of Queens, Jersey City Medical Center, Queens Hospital Center, North General Hospital, and Cabrini Medical Center. Services are provided by 110 faculty members, 47 mid-level providers, 48 emergency medicine residents, and a large number of rotating house staff. Elmhurst Hospital Center is one of the busiest level one trauma centers in New York. The Jersey City Medical Center emergency department is the only trauma center in Hudson County and is responsible for EMS medical control. Cabrini Medical Center provides hyperbaric medicine and wound care training and clinical services. Our Department has eight divisions: Education, Research, Prehospital Care and Disaster Medicine/EMS, Pediatric Emergency Medicine, Toxicology, Geriatric Emergency Medicine, Informatics, and International Medicine. Each division is responsible for its own research and didactic program. Career growth and professional satisfaction are the overarching goals for our faculty development plans. All of our faculty members at each clinical site are responsible for activities that fulfill five elements in a career development matrix. The elements are: clinical service, education, research or other scholarly activities, administration, and community service. The formula for each faculty member differs according to his or her long-range career goals, but participation in some aspect of each of these areas is expected. Evidence that this program is working are the low faculty turnover and the large number of faculty awards and publications. Our four-year Emergency Medicine Residency is now in its tenth year. Our Residents receive their clinical training at Elmhurst Hospital Center, The Mount Sinai Hospital, and Jersey City Medical Center. The thrust of our training program is to allow residents to recognize and develop their potentials at their own rates in their own unique manner. Bedside education stresses application of classical emergency medicine principals in a humanistic supportive patient environment. Our didactic program emphasizes both basic issues of patient care and cutting-edge medicine and integrates new development in the basic sciences. We have major new educational initiatives in the areas of ultrasound and clinical simulations. Each resident can choose one or more mentors to help him/her focus on their educational and career development issues. Our clinical research program is focused on health services and health outcomes research. The major areas currently in focus are the patient with an acute neurologic or neurosurgical problem, the geriatric patient in the ED, and providing health care to underserved populations. We are actively investigating the ethical issues of emergency research without informed consent, the informatics database for emergency care, variations in treatment of geriatric patients associated with ED overcrowding, the utility of BETA blocking drugs in the prevention of post traumatic stress, and treatment of asthma with CPAP and ED utilization (EMPATH study). Grantees currently have support from the NIH, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, New York State, the Jahnigen Fund and from a number of pharmaceutical organizations. At this time of general fiscal retrenchment for academic medical centers, we are fortunate to be able to continue to foster the growth and maturation of our programs. Sheldon Jacobson, M.D.Professor and Chair, Emergency Medicine |