About the Emergency Medicine Department

Henry Ford Hospital is a quaternary care, nonprofit, community hospital with a strong academic mission located in Detroit. It operates one of the busiest Level 1 Trauma centers in Michigan with over 100,000 patient visits each year. The Henry Ford Hospital Department of Emergency Medicine is a nationally recognized leader in patient care, education and research. We have been educating Emergency Medicine residents since1976 and gained independent departmental status in1982.

We serve a high acuity, diverse, urban patient population. Twenty-five percent of the patients seen are admitted, and 45 percent of all hospital patients are admitted through the Emergency Department.

Our patient population consists of:

• 20% critically ill
• 49% emergent care
• 19% pediatrics
• all others: 12%

There are over 4,000 resuscitations annually. The EM senior resident is the team leader in all medical and trauma resuscitations. The EM junior resident is responsible for the primary survey and life-saving procedures under the supervision of the staff physician.

The department has dedicated resuscitation rooms, a 16 bed critical care area and separate areas for emergent, urgent and pediatric care. The Department has X-ray suites, two CT scanners, and an ultrasound suite, all fully staffed with technicians and 24 hours of radiologist coverage. In addition, numerous beside mobile ultrasound machines are present in the department exclusively for emergency physician use. A 24-hour on-site pharmacy and ED pharmacist provide rapid access and distribution of medications as well as physician consultation. The department consists of a diverse group of over 50 faculty and 57 residents in three training tracks (EM, EM/Internal Medicine and EM/IM/Critical Care). There are also Physician Assistants, and hundreds of nurses and other support personnel employed by the department.

We provide clinical training opportunities for our Emergency Medicine residents and residents from other training programs. We also participate in the training of medical students from Wayne State University, University of Michigan, and many other local and national medical schools. Scrubs, lockers, resident office space and a lactation room are all located within the emergency department.

The health system uses EPIC, a fully integrated Electronic Health Record system, with the option to use integrated voice recognition dictation software.

The Department of Emergency Medicine has led the nation on the development of Early Goal-Directed Therapy and the Surviving Sepsis Campaign. The faculty continue to perform ground-breaking research in numerous fields that set standards for patient care across the country. We were awarded a grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the National Institute for Neurologic Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) to become a hub in the Neurologic Emergencies Treatment Trials (NETT) Network. We encourage you to learn more about our varied research endeavors on our research page.