Curriculum

Designed with Your Success in Mind

Our curriculum provides outstanding, broad-based clinical training while allowing you room to customize your education to fit your personal career interests. With four years to train, you will have the opportunity to explore a wide range of specialties within emergency medicine, building your expertise and marketability.

No two days are exactly alike when you are an emergency medicine resident. Everyone starts out with an orientation month and the schedules will vary from there, with everyone taking the same core rotations but not necessarily in the same order. Our program is structured in blocks. During ED months, you will typically work 18-21 shifts, lasting about 8-10 hours each. Four months are set aside for electives.

Curriculum Highlights

  • Broad-based clinical training in 3 diverse practice environments.
  • Fully integrated 48-month curriculum.
  • Choice of Professional Development Track in an emergency medicine specialty.
  • Accessible, caring faculty fully invested in your education and success.
  • Robust selection of elective opportunities — and resources to create your own.
  • Exposure to unique training opportunities, like EC3, MCIRCC, Survival Flight, and global health.

You will formally meet with your advisor at least every 6 months for a semi-annual review of performance and goal setting, including discussions about your individual professional development track plan.

Conferences

Emergency medicine residents have scheduled conferences for 5 hours on Wednesdays. All residents are released from the ED to attend.

Longitudinal Experiences

EMS

Starting as interns, residents participate in extrication training, HVA ride-alongs, and pre-hospital communication training. In later years, residents develop experience in the administrative aspects of EMS including run reviews, education for pre-hospital providers, and regional planning meetings. Residents with a strong interest in pre-hospital care may opt to pursue more advanced training through the EMS Professional Development Track.

 

Survival Flight

Our residents can become physician members of the flight team starting in the second year of the program.

Emergency Critical Care Center

Professional Tracks

Residents apply for a Professional Development Track after their second year. These tracks offer a unique opportunity to pursue your passion in a specialized area of emergency medicine, developing marketable expertise while you train.

Global Health

The University of Michigan has long-standing partnerships with health providers and institutions around the world. Residents are welcome to submit global health project ideas and objectives to our Graduate Medical Education office to get exposure to an exciting and inspiring practice environment they would not otherwise see. Our Department of Emergency Medicine partners with the Center for Global Health and the National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center to provide support for the Ghana Emergency Medicine Collaborative.

Other countries our residents have worked in:

  • Haiti
  • India
  • Ecuador
  • Indonesia
  • South Africa
  • South Korea

Electives

During five months of elective time, residents can pursue interests in everything from observational medicine to difficult airway management to dentistry to ophthalmology. New electives are developed every year. There are a large number of electives that fit many people’s needs, however you are welcome to propose a new elective and receive full support and resources to do so.

Elective examples include:

Rural Medicine
  • Hancock Emergency Medicine (rural experience based in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula)
  • Big Sky, Montana
Global Health
  • Ghana Emergency Medicine Collaborative
Clinical Training
  • Pediatric Emergency Medicine mini-fellowship month
  • Ultrasound
  • Toxicology (through Detroit Poison Center)
  • Dentistry

“About half of our residents come in with a clear vision of what their career is going to be, and the other half comes in fairly undifferentiated and start to define their path over the next couple of years. By the middle of the second year, everyone has a very clear career development plan.” — Laura Hopson, M.D., Associate Chair of Education