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.

Health equity longitudinal curriculum

Rotation 1	Rotation 2	Rotation 3
Orientation Experience Wilmington history and debriefing Lecture on whole patient care and consistent high-quality care for all	Ambulatory Family Medicine & Behavioral Medicine Video encounters: cultural humility, trauma-informed care
Rotations
Community Medicine Agency visits, home visits Lecture on community medicine, whole person care	Health Systems Management Programs and advocacy Population health	Total Population Care Clinical gaps, social drivers of health, and quality improvement reflection Population health vs. community health
Community-Oriented Primary Care: 1 project per resident before graduating
Intern Support Group	Ambulatory Family Medicine Home visits (socio-ecologic model, human complexity, and personally held beliefs reflection)
Balint Group (cultural humility, trauma-informed approach)
Inpatient Behavioral Rounds (patient culture)

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 philosophy, with awareness of various scenarios patients face as they endeavor to achieve the highest level of health and wellness.

This requires attention to health factors outside of the clinical setting. New Hanover Regional Medical Center hosts multiple community outreach events, in which residents are invited to participate. These include community health screenings, food insecurity prevention activities, and other community education events.

Community advisory council

Family medicine residents are invited to participate on our Novant Health Family Medicine Wilmington Community Advisory Council, a group consisting of physicians, clinical staff, patients, family members, and community leaders invested in the health of the community we serve.

Community-oriented primary care

NHRMC family medicine residents are required to take part in at least one community-oriented primary care (COPC) project during residency. Community-oriented primary care embraces the concept of continual community involvement in the steps of:

Defining the community
Identifying community needs
Developing an intervention
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.

Global Health

The program has periodically helped field interdisciplinary teams for 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

Our residents and attendings help staff free annual middle and high school sports physicals each spring at the health department. In addition, our residents are required to work with training staff at various local sporting events (often high school but may include UNC Wilmington club sports) as part of their musculoskeletal training. Other opportunities include the annual Wilmington Marathon and USA Boxing events across the state.