Page 2 - Regions Annual Report

From the Director
May 2020, people were settling into our new home and work environment when George Floyd was murdered locally in Minneapolis. For a short while we had to
react to life and work with protests, both peaceful and violent, and things like curfews, the National Guard, and taking care of injuries from tear gas canisters and rubber bullets. Long term we realized what a long way we still had to go both locally and nationally to work
on racism, social justice, and also healthcare disparities (as we started to learn about how COVID more negatively affected certain populations of patients). Even though our residency, department and hospital all had been working on these areas over the past years, the events of 2020 clearly gave us more purpose and momentum to continue to learn and improve over the next years. We have room to grow, but I really like
the discussions and work we are doing in these areas.
June 2020 is when we typically would have done our large, formal graduation dinner and ceremony. As it became clear that doing that would not be safe or meet recommended state guidelines, we did a much smaller outdoor celebration with a tent in my backyard to congratulate the class of 2020! By this time most of
our rotations were back to normal and we had settled into the ED care of all patients now wearing plenty of PPE during each shift! June is also when we welcome our new intern class, and just like everything else we had to do their onboarding a little different than in prior years. Masks, smaller sessions, and an outdoor picnic with social distancing to welcome them to Regions!
From the summer months until now, things are slowly getting back to a more normal pattern. Medical students have returned, and although our weekly conferences have been working pretty good with the virtual platform we are starting to get people back on campus and learning together again (with masks and social distancing of course!) in order to get the social support network back in place and to improve education with in person discussions. It has been so nice to see smiles and hear laughter again on campus each Thursday!
The last new adventure for the program was virtual interview season. Due to COVID there was a national recommendation for this year to do all residency interviews virtually. So for at least this year we will not host in person dinners or do in person interview days. All done virtually!
Thank you to everyone that contributes to the success of our program – our residents, faculty, Departmental, Residency and hospital administrative leadership, fantastic clinical team in the Emergency Department, clinical educators both at Regions and in the community, and the Office for Health Professional Education crew! We hope you enjoy this unique peek back at the past year, in what was definitely a remarkable year!
CULLEN HEGARTY, MD
Program Director
Greetings from St. Paul, Minnesota and the HealthPartners Institute/Regions Hospital Emergency Medicine Residency Program! What a year that 2020 has been! Given the uniqueness of this past year, we thought we would do the Annual Report a little bit differently than we do in most years. Instead of a fairly comprehensive review of all elements of the program throughout the report, we are just going to start with a residency and departmental update on 2020. The rest of the report be a review of the year in pictures, taken by our talented Dr. Ellen Dore, class of 2022.
2020 started out like any other year in the residency. Interview season wrapped up, rotations were going per usual, and the residents did their practice written and oral board exams.
March 2020 a group of us traveled to New York City for the CORD Academic Assembly. The week we were there is when things really changed for the country and our program. COVID cases started popping up in NYC, and when we returned to Minnesota there were already a few cases locally.
The next few months for the program were spent attending planning meetings to prepare for a potential surge in COVID patients, adjusting to residents on quarantine, and altering rotations factoring in resident safety and resident education. Other than clinical work, everything went virtual—Zoom and WebEx meetings, conferences and social gatherings. Employee Health worked closely with us to make sure we had the best combination of PPE available, and new work guidelines were established to make sure we were all able to work safely during the pandemic. All medical student clinical rotations were shut down by the Medical School. It was quite a few months of uncertainty!