Mission Statement

Mount Sinai Morningside-West Emergency Medicine's Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (MSMW EM JEDI) committee is a coalition of faculty and residents dedicated towards promoting the health of underserved communities, educating future health leaders, and promoting social justice advocacy through education, research and outreach.

We realize as frontline providers that emergency departments serve as a mirror that reflects the challenges and obstacles that our patient communities experience. These barriers often reveal the most critical social determinants of health, which require us look deeper into the root cause of emergencies in health care. In this current climate, we recognize more than ever the importance of understanding how factors such as systemic racism, bias, and health disparities can greatly affect patient health outcomes. The practice of medicine changes in tandem with emerging social issues, as result physician roles have to evolve to respond to the needs of individuals, the profession and society at large. However to better serve as allies to our patients, we must first be conscious of the social fabric that makes up our community so that we can weave together clinical knowledge and social understanding on behalf of the patient’s health.

We aim to inform and promote the role that emergency medicine can play an intersection between medicine and society through patient advocacy, promotion of health equity, and elimination of health disparities locally, nationally, and globally. We are preparing our emergency medicine residents and faculty to frame their clinical work through a health equity lens through education and application of strategies on topics such as Structural Racism in health care, Gender and sexual orientation disparities, Immigrant health, Homelessness and food security, Addiction medicine and Human rights advocacy.

Through the MSMW EM JEDI committee our residency program is committed to expanding our emergency medicine curriculum’s focus on health equity education, outreach into our community and increasing the presence of underrepresented minorities into our program to better reflect and serve our diverse patient population. Thus, as a department we strive to build a strong community of residents and faculty who are dedicated to stimulating genuine social change of health care that is more just, equitable, diverse and inclusive to not only improve patient health outcomes but also foster more trust in a broken health care system to create healthier and empowered communities.

Goals and Objectives

1. Increase engagement of our residents and faculty with our surrounding communities of color in an effort to increase their access to care, improve health equity and provide healthcare education.

2. Engage with undergraduate and medical school organizations to encourage careers in healthcare and emergency medicine for URM students.

3. Develop recruitment strategies and provide mentorship for prospective URM residents to our program.

4. Develop and support educational sessions for current residents and faculty on topics related to health disparities and how to combat them.

Current Projects

• COVID-19 Vaccine information in English and Spanish and outreach to local groups and media outlets that cater to people of color on vaccine education.

• Development of health equity curriculum for residency conference.

• Blanket drive at both hospital sites for undomiciled patients.

• URM "Second Look" Event for interviewees. - Be on the lookout for an e-mail for more information on this!

• Affiliating with Mentoring in Medicine (http://medicalmentor.org/) to host students of color as volunteers and shadows in our EDs.

• Serving as mock interviewers for SNMA students applying into EM.