Chair's Letter

STATE OF WAYNE STATE EM: A Summary from the Departmental Retreat

"It is a GOOD time, to be a GREAT Department."

As 2022 comes to an end, I wanted to take a look back at what we have accomplished and where our department is headed. The department continues to remain in an excellent position regarding our four pillars of missions, education, clinical care, community engagement and research. We should take pride in the plethora of awards, grant funding and research opportunities we have received. For decades, our EM Clerkship at the SOM has consistently been rated in the top 2% of EM Clerkships nationally. Our faculty teach more medical students than any other faculty at the SOM, including: ALS/BLS, First Aid First, Clinical Ultrasound, Simulation, OSCI, Procedure Labs and Clinical Research Mentoring, for which we offer the Skjaerlund Award. 

As 2023 arrives, our outlook includes expanding our footprint at the school, in the City of Detroit and in the State of Michigan. The Michigan Poison & Drug Information Center is housed under Emergency Medicine and we are supporting their expansion on the state level and assisting to manage the center. This center is one of 55 accredited poison control centers across the nation and provides service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. As COVID came, so did the creation of the Mobile Health Units in conjunction with Wayne Health. The department has expanded services to not only offer COVID testing and vaccines, but also provides linkage to care services for hypertension and mental health, needle exchange program, and health screening for diabetes, high cholesterol and kidney disease. We are also looking to expand our Addiction Medicine services to provide to our patients and community. The Global Health faculty have been hard at work with the GLUE and GHRC programs and creating global health curriculum to medical students. 

Our Fingerprints are all over the City of Detroit.

• Hands on Heart: Targeted CPR training to high-risk areas
• Heart Safe Detroit Public School System:
  • Trained Bus Drivers, Physical Education, Teachers
• HEART: Cardiac screening including Echo for youth athletics
• D-LIVE: Intervention to break the circle of violence 
• Free ED Naloxone distribution
• NIAA Funded Buprenorphine induction trial
• CART and Hot Hand Off for OUD intervention 
• Edward S, Thomas Foundation:
  • Supports community engagement, advisory boards, CPR training, CV risk screening 

I will let the numbers speak for themselves.

Went from 28^th to 7^th in rankings for EM NIH funding:

 2022 2-Year Goals

• Engage more clinical faculty into research. 
• Increase research efforts and encourage participation in translational research projects through continued collaboration with the CVRI, CMMG, PM&R, MR research center and the department of physiology.
• Continue to expand the clinical research network to more fully engage our affiliated institutions including but not limited to Beaumont, HFHS and additional resources to St. John. 
• Form a departmental research budget committee to oversee the current funding, debits, fund allocation, long range planning and aid in grant budgets if requested.
• Capitalize on recent expansion into observational medicine and continue some research initiated at our affiliated institutions to investigate risk stratification of ACS and TIA
• Capitalize on the success of our fellowships faculty and fellows with emphasis on obtaining funding and increasing publications in addition to expanding research opportunities across the 3 WSU sites.

2022 Long Term Goals

• Expand on the "big data" idea with gathering large amounts of data (i.e. first blood pressures via EMS) to geocode and identify hot spots that may benefit from focused assessment and management.
• Expand and continue WSU EM presents as a public health leader and advocate to reduce and eliminate health disparities in Detroit.  Work in collaboration with other WSU departments as well as the Detroit Health Department and Michigan State Department of Community Health.  Continue to perform point of care testing for communicable diseases across ED sites
• Incorporate a Biostatistician 
• Recruit more academic EM physicians into the Department
• Increase the numbers of Associate and Full Professors and those in the tenure track.
• Continue to build a bench to bedside research machine

Fun fact:  Since 2015 the department has assisted over 130 students with various professional school program placements and career advancements!

Lastly, I would like to thank Cari and our administration for an excellent retreat and all of our faculty, voluntary and paid for their time and efforts in making us an outstanding academic department.

Happy Holiday to you and yours!!

Brian J. O'Neil, MD, FACEP, FAHA
Dayanandan Endowed Chair & Professor
Department of Emergency Medicine
Wayne State University School of Medicine