Health Equity and Community Outreach

Health Equity

Our NHRMC Family Medicine Residency embraces and takes seriously a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In our residency program, this embodies ongoing critical assessment of personal biases, our interactions with each other and patients/families, as well as systemic factors that contribute to health disparities. Though cultural awareness, competency, and respect are necessary for high quality and effective health care, these are insufficient without exploration of personal bias and application through cultural humility.

Out of respect for the time needed for these activities and developing a DEI lens, we have created a Health Equity curriculum as an immersion program embedded longitudinally throughout all three years of residency training (shown below). We expect this curriculum to facilitate an understanding of how sociocultural determinants interplay within the social ecologic framework to affect health outcomes.

Community Outreach

Our NHRMC Family Medicine Residency is passionate about training its physicians to navigate the broad milieu of social and cultural backgrounds and environments they will face during their careers. The program is also vested in instilling a sense of social justice in its physicians, with awareness to current problems of health equity across the nation. This requires attention to health factors outside of the clinical setting.  New Hanover Regional Medical Center hosts multiple community outreach events, wherein residents are invited to participate. These include community health screenings, food insecurity prevention activities and other community education events, but additional specific opportunities are listed below.

• Community-Oriented Primary Care (COPC):NHRMC Family Medicine residents will be

  required to take part in at least one COPC project during residency. COPC embraces the concept of continual community involvement in the steps of 1) defining the community, 2) identifying community needs, 3) developing an intervention, and 4) monitoring the impact of the intervention. COPC exposure will being during intern year, with options to continue throughout residency.

• Service Learning: NHRMC Family Medicine residents may engage in a variety of service

  learning options. Residents enjoy helping staff St. Mary’s Clinic, which offers medical and dental care for the uninsured for those who are below 200% of the federal poverty guidelines. Residents also often frequently volunteer to lead classes for the Youth Offender Program, for juveniles facing first-time DUI charges.

• Global Health: The NHRMC Family Medicine Residency program has periodically helped field

  interdisciplinary teams for a one week medical mission experiences in the Dominican Republic, hosted by Solid Rock International. This is every 1-3 years and does take some advance planning, but is a very rewarding experience.

• Local Sporting Events: NHRMC Family Medicine residents and attendings help staff free annual middle and high school sports physicals each spring at the health department. The local Special Olympics also invite resident involvement at their sports physicals. Thanks to the mild climate and flat terrain, Wilmington is host to several major sporting events in which residents may volunteer as medical staff, including the Ironman, the Carolina Cup (largest stand up paddleboard race on the east coast), and numerous other surfing, biking and racing events. Lastly, our residents are required to work with training staff at various local sporting events (often high school but may include UNCW), as part of their musculoskeletal training.