About the Program
Message from the Program Director
"Training to a higher standard"
The Department of Emergency Medicine at the Wake Forest School of Medicine is fully committed to its residency training program. We are very proud of our heritage as being the oldest emergency medicine (EM) residency in the southeast and one of the founding programs in the country. We have hundreds of graduates practicing EM across the country in various different roles. Our alumni are chairs of departments, residency directors, presidents of groups, EMS directors, and front-line practicing emergency physicians. Even though we are an established program, by no means are we complacent. We continually strive to stay on the cutting edge of clinical emergency medicine, education, and research.
The highlight of our program is the outstanding clinical training each resident receives. Our university and community training sites offer a combined emergency department census in excess of 175,000 patient visits per year and growing. The primary training site, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center (WFBMC), is the tertiary care center for northwest North Carolina and southern Virginia and the teaching hospital for the Wake Forest School of Medicine. The medical center, which consistently ranks among the nations best, is a Level I trauma center nestled in a residential community in one of the south's most livable cities, Winston-Salem, NC. Moses Cone Memorial Hospital, located in Greensboro, NC (only 30-minutes from WFBMC) offers our residents the opportunity to train in a busy community hospital with one-on-one faculty teaching. Our graded clinical responsibility offers our residents a supportive nurturing environment to learn emergency medicine to the fullest. Our didactic education program is outstanding. We offer scheduled conference time each week and our faculty cover the ED so all residents may attend.
However, the people at Wake Forest are truly what sets our residency apart from the others. Our faculty are outstanding teachers, clinicians, researchers, and mentors. Our residency motto is "Training to a higher standard". We strive to recruit only faculty and residents with strong character traits in the areas of "competence, character, compassion, and communication".
Our program is always under constant scrutiny by our residents and faculty on how we can do better. The residents are actively involved in decisions that affect the training program. The combination of an excellent clinical environment and strong academic endeavors make our training program one of the best in the country. Come visit us, I know that you will be impressed with what Wake Forest and Winston-Salem has to offer.
Mitch Sokolosky, MD, FACEP
Residency Program Director