Each Emergency Medicine resident is expected to take part in a scholarly project before graduation. Motivated students will be encouraged to formulate an appropriate clinical question, perform a guided review of the literature and prepare their question in a way that it might be answered by scientific inquiry. Thereafter, they will be teamed with a faculty member who will provide further advice and assist with the design of the study. The resident will present the project to the monthly research conference, held the third Wednesday of each month, to elicit feedback from a larger audience.
Making use of the feedback obtained, the resident will then bring their fully developed study plan to the Emergency Medicine Research Committee for approval prior to submission to the IRB. Whenever possible, residents will be encouraged to find outside sources of funding, and will be assisted by appropriate members of the faculty. They will also be encouraged to present original research at regional and national meetings.
Residents can expect to be provided with appropriate software and computer support. This will include statistical modeling software, presentation software, and word processing materials. They will also be assisted in data acquisition by our Emergency Medicine Research Associates.
Research is a fundamental part of Emergency Medicine. We strive to have our daily practice informed by sound research. Critical appraisal of what is sometimes dispensed as "medical fact" often demonstrates limited data, or data obtained in a way that limits the conclusions that can be drawn from it.
'Good' Emergency Medicine research begins with a clinically relevand question. After the question is clarified, prior work published on the subject is reviewed. This may allow further modification of the initial question. The question is then developed into a scientifically testable model - the appropriate statistics and study design are identified, the size of the population that will need to be studied is determined, ant the resources that are available are compared to the resources that will be required for the study.
The combined campuses of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital offer tremendous resources for the approach to clinical research. The hospitals see 170,000 emergency patient visits annually, and include specialty receiving status for Trauma, Pediatric Trauma, and Burn Care. The population we serve encompasses a broad spectrum of New Yorkers, both economically and ethnically.
Our academic resources are vast. We are home to the Mailman School of Public Health (Columbia University), one of the oldest and most distinguished schools of public health in the United States, as well as the Weill Graduate School of Medical Sciences (Cornell University). We are uniquely positioned to draw on the expertise of the over 500 faculty and 1,500 graduate students engaged in masters and PhD level education. The library resources available at each location are world class. Many resources are available online, including full text journal articles, electronic search databases, and ongoing educational programs (http://library.med.cornell.edu/Library/Home.html http://cpmcnet.columbia.edu/library/index.html). In addition, our dedicated and distinguished faculty members in Emergency Medicine are motivated to further the education of all Emergency Medicine Residents both by mentoring and via assistance with individual projects.
