CURRICULUM
Tracks
We offer different tracks to help you sub-specialize in areas of interest during your residency.
What is global health?
Global Health is “an area for study, research, and practice that places a priority on improving health and achieving equity in health for all people worldwide. Global health emphasizes transnational health issues, determinants, and solutions; involves many disciplines within and beyond the health sciences and promotes interdisciplinary collaboration; and is a synthesis of population-based prevention with individual-level clinical care.” Global Emergency Medicine incorporates these global health principles into practice of emergency care in resource-limited settings, disaster and humanitarian response, and emergency medicine development.
What is social emergency medicine?
Social Emergency Medicine promotes the integration of social contexts into the practice of Emergency Medicine. It is the framework through which we recognize and appreciate the interplay of the social determinants of health and health disparities in emergency care and how these impact individual and community health measures and the illness experience.
Global health track
The UIC IM/EM global health program is a new entity in a established global and urban program at UIC that involves the family medicine, emergency medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics and med/peds programs. With the initiation of the IM/EM global health track, we can take advantage of the length of our residency to provide residents multidisciplinary didactics that span over a 2 year period with dedicated time to work on a longitudinal project (domestic or abroad) during the 3rd, 4th, and 5th years. The goal of the track is to develop a thorough skill set to work in the public health sector domestically or abroad.
With an International Emergency Medicine (IEM) fellowship associated with the residency and access to the UIC school of public health, we have created a 6 year IM/EM/IEM track in which you obtain an MPH and get dedicated time to work abroad during your 6th year. This concept is similar to the 6 year IM/EM/Critical Care tracks available at other programs. The goal of the program is to direct the candidate into the International Emergency Medicine Fellowship with an opportunity to extend a project over years. The IM/EM/IEM fellowship track will create leaders in the field of public health and provides valuable experience for those seeking a career in global health.
Social emergency medicine & population health track
The Emergency Department (ED) is the port of entry into the healthcare system for our most disenfranchised populations. EDs are taking ownership of our role as a safety net and are leading the way in the development of systematic interventions to improve population health. It is no longer feasible to separate an understanding of the social determinants of health from emergency medicine (EM) residency training.
Residency track objectives
The goal of our Social Emergency Medicine and Global Health Track is for participating residents to assert competence in addressing and alleviating health disparities. This program seeks to provide residents with the tools to deconstruct how social factors impact health outcomes and to build skills to provide high quality, patient-centered, culturally appropriate care to all patients, particularly those who are underserved and marginalized. This program is aimed at creating the future leaders of Social Emergency Medicine and Global Health in our specialty. Participants will:
- Understand the relationship between societal factors and health disparities and outcomes.
- Engage in meaningful mentorship and scholarship aimed at addressing health disparities through community (local or international) and ED-based interventions.
- Experience and gain appreciation for interdisciplinary approaches to healthcare challenges that are faced in emergency care.
- Complete a Social or Global Emergency Medicine Capstone Project
Current social EM research/projects
The Better Health Through Housing (BHH) program is a partnership between the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System (UI Health) and the Center for Housing and Health (CHH), a subsidiary of the Aids Foundation of Chicago. It is a demonstration pilot that is drawing attention to the nationally-validated Housing First model here in Chicago, with a goal of scaling and sustaining a permanent collective solution among healthcare, government, and housing agencies that will result in a dramatic reduction in the number of chronically homeless. Although the chronically homeless constitute 10-15% of the total homeless population, they account for 80-90% of public cost and utilization. Housing First programs throughout the country have demonstrated it costs society one-third to a half as much to provide supportive housing rather than allowing citizens to remain homeless.
See more information here
The CHAMPIONS NETWork (Community Health And eMPowerment through Integration Of Neighborhood-specific Strategies using a Novel Education & Technology-leveraged Workforce) is an innovative, community-based program that advances health equity by using the untapped resource of high school students from under-served communities to act as health screeners and advocates for an at-risk population who might otherwise “fall through the cracks” of the healthcare system. The CHAMPIONS NETWork improves population health at the grass-roots level with a huge impact on saving lives and improving health in hard-to-reach communities. The program also creates a pathway to college and professional health careers for under-served youth – creating the next generation of health researchers and clinicians.
See more information here
Illinois Heart Rescue (ILHR) seeks to increase out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) survival rates in the State of Illinois by at least 100%. To accomplish this goal, we have partnered with the Illinois Department of Public Health and existing state-wide quality improvement systems (Get with the Guidelines Stroke, Mission Lifeline) to recruit and train Emergency Medical Services (EMS) systems and hospitals in Illinois to collect quality cardiac arrest data into the CARES database that encourages improvement in local systems of care for sudden cardiac arrest. Our focus is to reduce health disparities in cardiac arrest outcomes using hot spotting to identify and intervene in communities with the highest incidence of cardiac arrest and poorest outcomes.
See more information here
Reaching out the system: HIV care where you are (ROOTS) is an innovative project to address gaps in care for people living with HIV.
This project aims to develop a novel HIV care model ROOTS Medicine (Reaching Out Of The System: HIV care where you are) to improve retention in care for PLWH affected by structural violence. The vision for this model is to provide care to any individual who experiences barriers to accessing care in the traditional hospital or clinic setting through an innovative care model. This project is in partnership with Project HEAL, an EMR-driven HIV screening and linkage to care program at UIC, and Chicago Recovery Alliance, a mobile outreach organization that focuses on harm reduction for people living with HIV and drug use.
See more information here
The word “ganas” in Spanish means “motivation sufficient to act.” L@S GANAS supports Latinx students in STEM with a great amount of “ganas”, desire, will and effort no matter where the student comes from or where they are going. The L@s GANAS Research Fellowship is a 2-year program that engages students in research-intensive experiences in Life Sciences, Chemistry, and beyond. Dr. Del Rios is one of many research mentors on campus supporting this program. Students participating in this program work closely with experienced researchers while earning credit and gaining hands-on experience.
See more information here
How to participate in this track
This is an opt-in track open to all EM and IM/EM residents in addition to the integration of Social Emergency Medicine didactics within the residency program as a whole. You are able to declare your intent to participate through our online form.
Please feel free to direct any questions, concerns or inquiries to Marina Del Rios (mdelrios@uic.edu) or Sukhi Bains (bainss@uic.edu).