Health Equity and Community Outreach

Health Equity

The New Hanover Regional Medical Center Family Medicine Residency program embraces and takes seriously a commitment to belonging. We embody this through ongoing assessment of personally held beliefs, our interactions with each other and patients/families, as well as social drivers that contribute to clinical health gaps. Cultural awareness, respect for all patients, and personalized, individualized care are essential to achieve high quality and effective care.

Out of respect for the time needed for these activities and developing a lens of belonging, we have created a health equity curriculum as an experiential program embedded longitudinally throughout all three years of residency training (shown in the following table). We expect this curriculum to facilitate an understanding of how to provide consistently high-quality care for all populations through understanding the interplay of culture, social drivers of health, health behaviors, and health outcomes.

Community Outreach

The New Hanover Regional Medical Center 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 whole-person, patient-centered approach 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.

Community-Oriented Primary Care

NHRMC Family Medicine residents will be required to take part in at least one community-oriented primary care project during residency. Community-oriented primary care embraces the concept of continual community involvement in the steps of

1. Defining the community
2. Identifying community needs
3. Developing an intervention
4. Monitoring the impact of the intervention

Community-oriented primary care exposure will begin 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 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 UNC Wilmington) as part of their musculoskeletal training.