School of Medicine

Detroit Receiving Residency Residency Director

Welcome to emergency medicine at Detroit Receiving Hospital! This website is designed to provide you with information about our residency program. We hope that you will find the content informative and encourage you to contact us if you require further assistance.

The Wayne State University/Detroit Medical Center program is an academic University based program at Detroit Receiving Hospital and Children's Hospital of Michigan. It is located in Detroit, Michigan. The residency is approved by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) to train 12 emergency medicine residents per year, and is a 3-year program of the PGY 1,2,3 format. We accept graduating medical students directly into the program to begin residency training. As part of the Detroit Medical Center (DMC), we utilize 5 different DMC institutions to provide a broad spectrum of patient care experience and clinical exposure.

It is our specific mission to educate our residents to

1. expertly evaluate and manage any patient presenting to an emergency department,
2. learn to recognize and treat patients with severity of illness or injury requiring immediate resuscitation and stabilization,
   
   • utilize consultation and referral services appropriately,
     
   • participate in an emergency medical system, and to provide supervision for and direction to emergency prehospital care personnel,
     
   • arrange for proper follow-up care of patients upon discharge from the ED,
     
   • participate in the administration of an emergency department,
     
   • be conversant regarding research methodologies and their application to emergency medicine, and
     
   • participate in the teaching of relevant concepts and applications of emergency medicine.

In addition, we have the following goals and ultimate objectives for our trainees:

• to become compassionate, competent, cost-effective practitioners of EM, with the ability to adapt their career to various settings,
  
• to foster scholarly interest in EM, such that our graduates will become life-long learners and teachers of EM, encouraging and motivating others to pursue careers in academic EM,
  
• to provide exposure to leaders in EM who can serve as mentors to prepare residents to assume future leadership roles at either the local, regional, or national level,
  
• to provide an environment of inquiry and learning in both the basic science and clinical research domains, with opportunities to participate in research projects under research faculty supervision, preparing some to pursue independent research, and
  
• to provide role models and opportunities for community service, such that our graduates will embody this ideal in the communities in which they practice.

Residency training in emergency medicine is truly a monumental task. I am a graduate of this program in 1987. I subsequently completed the inaugural Emergency Medicine Foundation Teaching Fellowship program in June 1990, which prepared me to become the residency director in September 1990. I have now had 16 years of experience running an emergency medicine program, and have been through 3 site reviews by the residency review committee in emergency medicine(RRC-EM). We are currently part of an EM pilot project with the ACGME, which allows for a prolonged site review cycle of up to 8 years, while providing annual reports to the RRC. Currently we enjoy full accreditation status with the ACGME. I am confident that this program offers the best training available to prepare you for a career in emergency medicine. I eagerly await the opportunity to meet with you and learn more about your interest in our specialty.

Robert P. Wahl, MD
Residency Program Director
Department of Emergency Medicine