University of Nebraska Medical Center

Emergency Medicine Residency Program

Mission Statement

The University of Nebraska EM residency program will strive to produce competent, compassionate physicians who have achieved excellence in clinical practice, academic pursuits, and service to their community and region.  The upper Midwest is predominantly made up of vast, non-urban areas that remain underserved by emergency medicine.  The residency program will place physicians in training in these non-urban EDs, encouraging future EM practice in these communities. 

Excellent clinical skills will grow from the resident’s active involvement in an ED offering a large and diverse patient population, residency trained/ABEM certified faculty dedicated to teaching, and a new state-of –the-art facility designed by EM faculty and planned to open in 2005.  The University of Nebraska College of Medicine includes outstanding residency programs in the specialties relevant to excellent EM training and enthusiastically supports the EM residency program. 

Academic achievement of residents, both in teaching and research, will develop through the mentoring of EM faculty.  The resident will participate directly in the various medical school teaching responsibilities currently undertaken by EM faculty.  The residency program will encourage resident research interests in both the clinical and basic sciences.  The Department of EM actively participates in injury prevention initiatives in the region and has published original research in the areas of intimate partner violence and injury epidemiology.  Basic science research opportunities are offered through a large animal laboratory operated in cooperation with the University of Nebraska College of Medicine Department of Physiology and several publications have resulted.  Recent experiments have addressed the efficacy of a new antidote to beta-blocker overdose and the use of heliox in percutaneous transtracheal jet ventilation.

The people living in non-urban areas lacking in residency-trained EM physicians will likely receive the greatest benefit from a residency program located in the heart of the upper Midwest.  The training program will take advantage of clinical opportunities in EDs located in communities of less than 100,000, and through this experience the resident may realistically consider a non-urban ED as a viable career choice.  EM topics unique to non-urban environments, such as rural EMS systems and farming-implement injuries, that may not make it into the curriculum of all training programs, will receive special attention.  Residency graduates from the program who choose to practice in the surrounding area, whether urban or rural, will undoubtedly provide for optimal ED care for the communities of this region.