Department of Emergency Medicine
Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
We embrace all types of diversity as strength and as part of our commitment to excellence in our mission areas of patient care, research, and education.
Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
We embrace all types of diversity as strength and as part of our commitment to excellence in our mission areas of patient care, research, and education.
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The Department of Emergency Medicine strives to create, maintain, and support a workforce that mirrors the diverse patient population we serve in Rhode Island. We recognize and embrace all types of diversity as strengths and as part of our commitment to excellence in our mission areas of patient care, research, and education. We believe that diversity in our faculty, residency, and fellowship programs is essential to the promotion of health equity for our patients and to our success as leaders in emergency medicine. Through our programming, initiatives, and affinity groups, we seek to foster a meaningful sense of belonging for all our providers and center the voices of people who have historically been marginalized in academic medicine.
The Department of Emergency Medicine strongly encourages applications from those who are under-represented in our specialty, including women, BIPOC individuals, people with disabilities, and LGBTQIA+ candidates. Brown Emergency Medicine does not discriminate or condone discrimination by any member of our community against any individual on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin or primary language, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, parental status, marital status, age, disability, citizenship, or veteran status in matters of admissions, employment, housing, or services or in the educational programs or activities it operates.
Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Leadership
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Almaz Dessie, MD
Director, Diversity & Inclusion; Chair, Brown Emergency Medicine BDEI Group; Director, Pediatric EM Ultrasound Fellowship; Associate Professor, Emergency Medicine -
Fahad Ali, MD
Director, Diversity Education, Recruitment, & Community Engagement; Vice-Chair, Brown Emergency Medicine BDEI Group; Assistant Professor, Emergency Medicine, Clinician Educator -
Nadine Himelfarb, MD
Director, Brown Emergency Medicine Women's Faculty Development Group (WoBEM); Associate Professor, Emergency Medicine, Clinician Educator -
Ambuj Suri, MD
Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Chief Resident
Diversity & Recruitment
The Department of Emergency Medicine is deeply engaged in promoting belonging, diversity, equity, and inclusion through numerous initiatives both within and outside our department.
We strongly encourage applicants from historically underrepresented groups and employ a holistic approach to the evaluation of applicants in our residency, fellowship programs, and faculty recruitment. We do not screen by board scores due to the inherently inequitable nature of this practice.
For more information, contact Alex Sheng, MD, for Residency related questions and Linda Brown, MD, MSCE, for questions regarding Faculty Recruitment.
We offer a $2,500 scholarship for fourth-year medical students who are historically underrepresented in medicine to participate in our ED sub-internship. You will work alongside and learn from residents and faculty in our busy emergency department, receive mentorship, and learn all about Brown EM and how you could fit in here. For more information, visit the Office of Belonging, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion website.
Each winter we hold a Second Look for those applicants who interviewed with us and identify as a person of color. This allows the applicant to experience of our bi-monthly affinity group dinners with residents and faculty of similar backgrounds.
We support faculty and residents to attend various conferences such as LMSA, SNMA both locally and nationally. We also see this as an opportunity to network and recruit students, residents, and faculty to our institution.
Contact Fahad Ali, MD, and Alex Sheng, MD, for more information.
Equity
The Division of Social Emergency Medicine brings focus to the structural forces that perpetuate health inequalities, both within the Emergency Department and beyond. At the frontlines of the healthcare system, we bear daily witness to the ways in which social determinants of health influence our patients and communities. SEM uses the lens of the ED to investigate social patterns of health inequity, identify social needs contributing to disease, and develop interventions to decrease disparities for underserved and marginalized populations.
Street Medicine is the practice of bringing quality healthcare out of clinics/hospitals and into the community, meeting people where they are—streets, parks, encampments, under bridges, etc. Street Medicine is a means of both delivering much-needed acute care as well as facilitating trust-building and healing between the medical community and people who are experiencing unsheltered homelessness, thus creating the opportunity for engagement with comprehensive, longitudinal care. Accessible and compassionate medical care has the power to restore dignity to this marginalized population that often feels abandoned by both society and the health care system. The Street Medicine team includes physicians, nurses, APPs, residents, and medical students across a variety of specialties including Emergency Medicine, Internal Medicine, Infectious Disease, and Addiction Medicine. We work in close collaboration with local community organizations who provide non-medical street-based outreach services such as case management, harm reduction, and basic needs provision.
Offering a rich array of practice opportunities and mentorship in all key domains of Social Emergency Medicine, including clinical care, research, administration, education, and advocacy, the Social Emergency Medicine Fellowship offers a rich array of practice opportunities and mentorship in all key domains of Social Emergency Medicine, including clinical care, research, administration, education, and advocacy.
Our faculty and residents receive ongoing education with 6-8 interactive lectures, workshops, and panels per year on a variety of topics related to health equity and social emergency medicine. Using anti-racist methodology, this grant-funded, novel curriculum engages with how our personal biases, institutions, and social structures contribute to inequitable health outcomes and how to better connect and serve our community. Topics include: race and identity, addiction medicine, caring for unhoused patients, racism in research, policing in the emergency department, LGBTQ health, immigrant health, and caring for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated patients.
For more information, contact Almaz Dessie, MD, Fahad Ali, MD, and Gianna Petrone, MD
- Brown EM BDEI Committee/Group
- For more information, contact Almaz Dessie, MD.
- BPI BDEI Committee
The Alpert Medical School of Brown University hosts a number of pathway programs aimed at supporting the next generation of physicians. From elementary school students through undergraduates, various programs aim at providing mentorship and instilling a desire to pursue a career in medicine. As a department, we have coordinated events for several of these programs and several of our physicians are often tapped to partake in school visits and other activities aimed at promoting careers in healthcare among underrepresented youth.
Inclusion/Belonging
Our department supports regular dinners for various minority groups in our department. For residents, this time is also protected from scheduled clinical shifts. These includes Dinners for people of color, the LGBTQ+ Community dinners, and First Generation/Low-Income
Peer mentorship, social events, and professional development workshops for women-identified faculty and trainees at Brown Emergency Medicine.
Contact Nadine Himelfarb, MD, for more information
You will see nearly all our faculty and trainees wearing pronoun badges and incorporating pronoun introduction into the beginning of all shifts. We continue to seek ways to improve the clinical and educational experience of our colleagues and patients who are transgender, gender queer, and gender diverse.
Career Development/Support
We offer internal funding through Brown Physicians, Inc. to support historically underrepresented faculty through 4-year career development grants ($100,000).
Brown EM sponsors faculty each year to attend the AAMC’s faculty development workshops for junior and mid career women and minority faculty
We have robust research and grantsmanship infrastructure that supports our faculty from underrepresented groups to successfully obtain extramural funding. Our current URiM faculty have been funded by the NIH through Diversity Supplements, the Emergency Medicine Foundation, the Rhode Island Foundation, the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, and Brown Physicians, Inc. to pursue research and other academic projects.
Additionally, we partner with the Brown Health hospital system's efforts to improving equity and belonging as well as Brown Medical School’s numerous offerings to support faculty and trainees from all backgrounds including the Office of Women in Medicine and Sciences and the Office of Belonging, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (OBEDI). Many of our faculty and trainees participate in their programming including serving as mentors to students pursuing scholarly concentrations in LGBTQ+ Healthcare and Advocacy and Caring for Underserved Communities. We also are actively involved in the medical school's pathway programs, Mentoring and Educating Diverse Students and Trainees to Excel as Physicians (MEDSTEP), and the faculty Justice Equity Diversity and Inclusion Group.