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IUEM Advocacy Program

Objectives

  • Appreciate the importance of many societal factors that influence health, disease, disability, and access to care.
  • Enhance advocacy skills by community partnership projects
  • Make advocacy a core professional value for emergency physicians
  • Achieve system or policy social change at the local, state, and national level over time

"The great aim of education is not knowledge but action."

-Herbert Spencer

"[This program] has taught us that small interventions can pay huge dividends. "

-Advocacy Project Volunteer


 

The IU Department of Emergency Medicine Advocacy program was conceived during the fall of 2006 as a way to try to improve health and education of targeted Indianapolis-area youth while they are still learning adult life skills. IUEM faculty and residents developed a partnership title with Forest Manor Middle School, a local urban public middle school titled "The Doctor is In" to provide regular academic tutoring and life skills education to an identified group of highly at-risk students.
  In addition to weekly academic and life skills tutoring, residents and faculty have sponsored a bicycle safety fair, drug awareness training, health education, a toy drive, and other activities directed at the communities and neighborhoods where our students live.

Residents from all stages of training are involved with advocacy activities, and the advocacy project has continued to expand. Advocacy activities are an important part of medical education because it gives physicians an avenue to impact the continuum of medical care before a patient is seen in the emergency department. Teaching life skills is one way to improve our communities and better integrate health education into the lives of our youth.

In the future, we hope to offer CPR classes, start a middle school science club, and formalize our mentor training program.

For more information, or if you are interested in partnering with the Indiana University Emergency Medicine Advocacy Program, please contact:

Jennifer Walthall, MD
Methodist Emergency Medicine and Trauma Center
I-65 at 21st Street
PO Box 1367
Indianapolis, Indiana, 46202-1367
Telephone: 317-962-5975
E-mail: jdhewlet@iupui.edu

A special thank-you to our community partners:

© 2008, Department of Emergency Medicine
Indiana University School of Medicine
Indianapolis, Indiana