MMC Emergency medicine

JEDI - Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

Mission Statement:

The Maine Medical Center Emergency Department serves a diverse patient population and we are committed to recruiting and supporting residents and faculty that reflect this diverse patient population.  

We value the perspectives of people from all backgrounds and welcome those who identify as minorities based on race, ethnicity, gender identification, sexual orientation, disability, spirituality or socioeconomic status and other forms of individuality. We are committed to fostering an environment where residents from all backgrounds feel supported. 

The goal of MMC’s Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) group is to create a strong framework within the residency of social justice. We plan to accomplish this by reworking our educational curricula to better highlight health care inequality, look internally to identify and address inequalities within our own health care system, and establish a presence of activism in the community.

Our JEDI group has been structured with three sub-committees which include recruitment and activism, tasked with measures to improve recruitment of a diverse residency, research and accountability, tasked projects examining intradepartmental metrics, and the outreach and education sub-committee, tasked with curricular development and community outreach projects. 

We understand that these are not problems with simple solutions, and know that the change we seek will not occur overnight. Regardless, we are committed and will do all that we can. We hope you will join us in these efforts. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to any of the resident contacts listed below. 

Residency Subcommittees

 What we’re up to: 

Recruitment and activism sub-committee: We are currently working with community partners to roll out a curriculum this spring for local highschool students, with an emphasis on reaching URM students. The course is called “Intro to medicine.” It will be a month long curriculum during which we get to zoom with students about various topics. We will teach a little bit about medicine, talk about our path that led us to EM & give case presentations. Eventually we hope to develop a mentorship program between students and residents!

Research and accountability  sub-committee:  Excited to say that our current project just was granted IRB approval! We are using a huge hospital data set to look at many parameters including things like patient ethnicity, language, acuity, admission vs discharge, wait times, and looks for discrepancies which may highlight care gaps. Ultimately, the goal will be to run this data set biannually to look for changes and monitor response to data driven interventions. 

Outreach and education sub-committee: This sub-committee is up to some great stuff! In April, MMC will be the second residency to implement the RISE-EM curriculum (Resident Instruction in Social Emergency Medicine). This is a novel curriculum developed by one of our interns, Heidi Roche, that will be published in CORD. The outreach and education subcommittee has also partnered with one of our resident education faculty members, Dr. Jeff Holmes, who runs the Down East EM podcast to start a monthly JEDI piece. The goal will be to have both articles and podcasts, written by residents, covering local and national news as it relates to the intersection of JEDI and emergency medicine. We hope to start these monthly episodes this spring.

We are excited to offer a Visiting Student Diversity Scholarship Program which can be applied for within the VSLO application to the rotation. Please review the criteria via this link and the attached file discusses the scholarship program. Low cost housing in walking distance to the hospital, as well as to all of downtown Portland, is available through the medical center to all applicants.

Student Electives

For additional details on our rotation and applying, please see the Med Student Rotation page!