About Us
Since we launched our first class of six emergency medicine residents on July 1, 2004, our department has grown and evolved. In January 2007, emergency medicine attained departmental status after previously being a section of the Department of Surgery. That same June, we graduated our first residency class. Fast forward, and we have now graduated nearly 20 classes. We currently have about four dozen faculty members.
Our teaching activities center on our residency program, which is the only emergency medicine residency program in Nebraska, with 12 residents per class. We were the first residency program in the United States to require rural emergency department clinical rotations for our residents, and our second- and third-year residents continue to rotate in emergency departments across the state. With our community rotation at the Bellevue Medical Center in an Omaha suburb, we are one of the unique programs with residents learning emergency medicine in urban, suburban and rural sites.
In the College of Medicine, our faculty and residents lead the highly rated ultrasound curriculum, a unique longitudinal curriculum, one of a select few in the U.S., with hands-on scanning sessions as a part of anatomy and physiology labs, as well as clinical instruction and applications in the third and fourth years of medical school. We also teach the acute care block, the essential preparation for medical students transitioning to their clerkships with focused instruction in patient assessment, targeted diagnostics work-ups, and timely interventions, including multiple sessions addressing key procedural skills.
Our faculty pursue scholarly activity in both the clinical and basic sciences, with an active educational methodology and simulation group, an active clinical trials program, and a full basic science lab with National Institutes of Health and Department of Defense support. In 2018, UNMC rated in the Top 20 of all emergency medicine departments for NIH funding. Translational projects between the lab, our residents and academic faculty increase every year.
Our outreach activities focus on Nebraska and the unique needs of patients in rural communities with our Rural Emergency Medicine Course, but we also enjoy relationships with hospitals and medical universities around the world. Past educational partnerships include emergency medical education for medical students at Thai Binh Medical University and Hanoi Medical University in Vietnam. Other projects include point of care ultrasound education with Archbishop Loayza National Hospital/Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, Peru, and at Hunan Provincial People’s Hospital/Changsha Medical University in Changsha, Hunan, China, and recognition and interventions for human trafficking/sexual assault with Akita University Graduate School of Health Sciences in Akita, Japan.
We are excited to continuously improve emergency care for the people of Nebraska and beyond.