Background: Community engagement is increasingly recognized as a necessity in addressing intractable racial and ethnic health disparities in the United States. However, institutions have not adequately trained resident physicians in developing symbiotic community partnerships that preserve community autonomy and identity without exploitation. Our goals were to highlight the experiences of expert academic emergency physicians in creating innovative, community-driven, and anti-racist solutions to achieving measurable equity in health outcomes and to introduce a novel framework entitled the Social Change Method to take a community-embedded intervention from concept to creation.
Methods: The methodology was based on the development of a didactic session at the 2023 SAEM Annual Meeting. The three novel initiatives discussed were Emergency Medicine Remix (EMR); Trust, Research, Access, and Prevention (TRAP) Medicine; and The Health Equity Accelerator (HEA). A team of multi-institutional experts convened to develop the session objectives through priority setting.
Results: Our expert panel discussed successes and challenges encountered while using evidence-informed strategies to conduct their community-based programming. Participant questions were centered on fostering sustainability, emphasizing the importance of carefully crafted interventions in the face of uncertain legislative challenges and strategies to empower others.
Conclusions: Emergency medicine residency education should incorporate training on methods to leverage community partnerships to improve individual and community health outcomes. The Social Change Method can be used as a conceptual framework to generate easily re-creatable and scalable partnerships that establish trust and forge relationships that honor identity and autonomy without exploiting community members.
© 2024 Society for Academic Emergency Medicine.