Mission Statement

Mount Sinai Morningside-West Emergency Medicine's Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (MSMW EM JEDI) committee is a coalition of faculty and residents dedicated towards promoting the health of underserved communities, educating future health leaders, and promoting social justice advocacy through education, research and outreach.

We realize as frontline providers that emergency departments serve as a mirror that reflects the challenges and obstacles that our patient communities experience. These barriers often reveal the most critical social determinants of health, which require us look deeper into the root cause of emergencies in health care. In this current climate, we recognize more than ever the importance of understanding how factors such as systemic racism, bias, and health disparities can greatly affect patient health outcomes. The practice of medicine changes in tandem with emerging social issues, as result physician roles have to evolve to respond to the needs of individuals, the profession and society at large.  However to better serve as allies to our patients, we must first be conscious of the social fabric that makes up our community so that we can weave together clinical knowledge and social understanding on behalf of the patient’s health. 

We aim to inform and promote the role that emergency medicine can play an intersection between medicine and society through patient advocacy, promotion of health equity, and elimination of health disparities locally, nationally, and globally. We are preparing our emergency medicine residents and faculty to frame their clinical work through a health equity lens through education and application of strategies on topics such as Structural Racism in health care, Gender and sexual orientation disparities, Immigrant health, Homelessness and food security, Addiction medicine and Human rights advocacy. 

Through the MSMW EM JEDI committee our residency program is committed to expanding our emergency medicine curriculum’s focus on health equity education, outreach into our community and increasing the  presence of underrepresented minorities into our program to better reflect and serve our diverse patient population. Thus, as a department we strive to build a strong community of residents and faculty who are dedicated to stimulating genuine social change of health care that is more just, equitable, diverse and inclusive to not only improve patient health outcomes but also foster more trust in a broken health care system to create healthier and empowered communities.