Chairman's Letter

Chairman's Welcome

Welcome to the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) website.  Founded in 2007, the Department of EM has experienced exciting growth in clinical, teaching, research, and community/state/global outreach activities, making significant contributions to the missions of UNMC and Nebraska Medicine.

We care for patients at UNMC and Bellevue Medical Center (BMC) EDs (over 90,000 total annual visits).  UNMC ED, with 65,000 patients per year, is located in urban Omaha, Nebraska and serves as the major tertiary care referral center, one of two ACS designated Level 1 trauma centers in the region, and the primary teaching hospital for the University of Nebraska College of Medicine and our EM residency program.  BMC in suburban Bellevue, Nebraska, sees 31,000 patients per year and serves as a community clinical ED rotation site for our residents.

Wadman

Our teaching activities center on our EM residency program, founded in 2005 as the first and only EM residency program in Nebraska, with six residents per class, but we have grown to 12 per class.  We were the first residency program in the US to require rural ED clinical rotations for our residents and our EM2s and EM3s continue to rotate in EDs across the state, from Fremont in the east, North Platte in the central Platte River Valley, to Scottsbluff in the western Panhandle.  With our community rotation at BMC ED in suburban Sarpy County, we are one of the unique programs with residents learning EM in urban, suburban, and rural sites.  We have exciting new opportunities for fellowships in our department, with our first ultrasound fellow in the 2019-2020 academic year and recruiting our first EMS and Medical Education Technology and Innovation (METI) fellows for July 2021.

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 US, with hands-on scanning sessions as a part of anatomy and physiology labs, as well as clinical instruction and applications in the M3 and M4 years.  We also teach the Acute Care Block, the essential preparation for med 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.

We pursue scholarly activity in both the clinical and basic sciences, with an active educational methodology and simulation group, a developing ED operations study group, an active clinical trials program, and a full basic science lab with NIH (rated in the Top 20 of all EM departments for NIH funding in 2018) and DOD support.  Translational projects between the lab, our residents, and academic faculty increase every year.  Recent basic science research addressed attenuation of reperfusion injury following both tourniquet application and frostbite, using small animal models.  In addition, this past July we completed participation in the multi-center VICTAS Trial, finishing 6th in enrollment out of 42 other sites.  In the upcoming, year we look forward to continuing our participation in the HOBIT Trial and other studies under the SIREN research network, as well as the installation of our small animal HBO chamber.

Our outreach activities focus on Nebraska and the unique needs of patients in rural communities with our EM Skills for the Rural Providers 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.  Ongoing 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 proud of who we are, grateful for our team, and excited to be on the path we are following to continuously improve emergency care for the people of Nebraska and beyond.  Please consider joining us.  We are always looking to add talent to the team and collaborate with the greater EM community in the US and around the world.

Michael C. Wadman, MD
Professor and Chair
Department of Emergency Medicine
University of Nebraska College of Medicine
University of Nebraska Medical Center and Bellevue Medical Center-Nebraska Medicine