Didactic Curriculum
Weekly Conference
Residents are required to attend weekly academic conferences every Wednesday. Two hours a week are spent on core curriculum using Foundations in Emergency Medicine. We also have either a guest lecture or a lecture from a faculty covering the foundations topic we are covering that week. The rest of our time is spent doing procedure labs, EKG workshops or ultrasound training days.
Patient Safety and Quality Conference
A monthly one-hour morbidity and mortality conference is held to discuss cases submitted by faculty, residents or nurses, or that are obtained via our hospital reporting system. A PGY-3 resident leads the session with EM faculty members present to guide discussions and offer recommendations to remedy deficits that are identified.
Grand Rounds
Grand Rounds lectures occur multiple times per year. Experts in the emergency medicine and other fields are invited to discuss their areas of interest during weekly conference.
Multidisciplinary Lectures and Conferences
Trauma drills and trauma conferences involve EM faculty, residents, and nurses, trauma surgery faculty and residents, as well as pre-hospital providers. Trauma drills are conducted as simulations in the trauma bays in the emergency department, with cases developed by emergency medicine residents. The drills include EMS providers who bring the trauma patient from the field, trauma surgery residents and attendings who are part of the trauma surgery team, respiratory therapists, emergency medicine nurses, and emergency medicine residents and attendings. The strong mutually supportive relationship between Upstate's Trauma Surgery Service and the Department of Emergency Medicine is strengthened by this conference.
We also invite our consult services to teach us about common emergency medicine presentations and subsequent management. Residents from these specialties also run procedure stations to help us hone our skills in certain specialized procedures and examinations, including epistaxis management, how to use the slit lamp, and how to perform the HINTS exam.
Twice per month, emergency medicine residents and faculty participate in a noon case conference with our internal medicine colleagues, with discussion of interesting cases occurring over lunch.
Ultrasound Education/Conference
Ultrasound conference occurs twice per year which provides an interactive teaching day with dedicated skill stations. Each conference day is 5 hours with live models at each station to allow residents to practice obtaining and interpreting images in real time.
Journal Club
The SUNY Upstate Emergency Medicine Residency Journal Club aims to compliment the clinical teaching and educational experiences of the residents by orienting them to the world of medical literature. The journal club underwent an extensive renovation during the 2017-2018 academic year, and continues to involve. It is now overseen by a committee comprised of one permanent member from each of the PGY-3 and PGY-2 classes as well as a faculty advisor. Each academic block, the PGY-2 resident who is doing his/her Toxicology block is charged with choosing the articles to be discussed that month and facilitating the conversation the day of journal club.
The goal with each journal club is to choose a seminal article that has shaped current practice patterns in emergency medicine in order to better understand the origins of the medical knowledge being taught during residency. This will be paired with a more recent and related article to foster interest in keeping current with medical research and to demonstrate the evolution of emergency medicine over time. Perhaps more importantly, the residents will learn the skills needed to read and critically appraise medical literature so that they are prepared to use the ever-growing databases of primary literature to make decisions about their own practices in emergency medicine. Check out summaries of our recent journal club discussions on our blog!
Asynchronous Learning
The SUNY Upstate emergency medicine residency recognizes the proliferation of educational resources that serve as an addition to the standard residency curriculum. Currently the RRC requires a minimum of 5 hours of conferences offered per week with 1 hour of allowable asynchronous learning to replace 1 hour of lecture content.