Research Learning Series (RLS) - Community Engaged Research: What and How?

Emergency medicine has always been a community-focused specialty. The nature of the services we provide means we meet our patients in some of their most vulnerable moments. As clinician-researchers, fostering community-engaged research not only protects the populations who trust us with their care but strengthens our research. But what is community-engaged research? Why does it matter and how can we put it into practice?

In this Research Learning Series (RLS) webinar, we discuss community-engaged research and why it matters and outline strategies for the practice of community-engaged research in the context of emergency medicine.

Authors

Cole Ettingoff, MPH

Medical Student

Trinity School of Medicine
Cole Ettingoff is a medical student at Trinity School of Medicine. He serves on several SAEM committees, chairs the ACEP Social EM Section working group on program evaluation and implementation, and leads several projects within NAEMSP. Prior to medical school, Cole worked in public health; first for the city of San Francisco, where his focus was on social determinants of health and improving quality of care. Then, in Montgomery County, Maryland, Cole helped lead the county-wide COVID task force and helped build a mobile integrated health program. He has been active in several leadership roles in the American Public Health Association and the American Association of Public Health Physicians, including chair of APHA's 2024 Symposium on Responding to Behavioral Health Emergencies. He is passionate about improving the quality of care for acute conditions in the prehospital and ED settings. He has a special interest in integrating the principles of EM, EMS, and public health in embracing EM's role as the ultimate safety net to collaborate and offer improvements for health outcomes.
Jon Soske, PhD

Research Associate

Lifespan Division of Addiction Medicine
Jon Soske, PhD is a person in long-term recovery from drug and alcohol addiction and a researcher who uses ethnographic and community-engaged strategies to understand the ongoing crisis in substance use and mental health treatment. He is currently a Research Associate at the Lifespan Division of Addiction Medicine, where he is a member of the team opening Rhode Island's first bridge clinic, and Systems of Care Fellow at the Center for Complexity at the Rhode Island School of Design.
David Yang, MD

Research and EMS Fellow

Yale University
David Yang, MD, is a Research and EMS Fellow in the Yale Department of Emergency Medicine. He earned his BS in Biomedical Engineering and BSAS in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, MD from LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans, and his MHS from Yale University. He recently completed his emergency medicine residency at Yale Department of Emergency Medicine. Nationally, he has served on the Equity and Inclusion Committee with SAEM. At the local level, he works closely with the sexual assault forensics committee and as an Interprofessional Longitudinal Clinical Experience (ILCE) mentor. His current research focuses on addressing disparities of care in three domains: discrimination that healthcare workers face in the clinical setting, disparities in care for survivors of sexual assault, and prehospital disparities in care for behavioral emergencies.
Elizabeth Samuels, MD, MPH, MHS

Associate Professor

UCLA
Elizabeth Samuels, MD, MPH, MHS, is an emergency medicine physician, health services trained researcher, and an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at UCLA. She completed her emergency medicine training at the Brown Emergency Medicine Residency Program, a health service research and health policy fellowship at the Yale National Clinician Scholars Program, and is board certified in Emergency Medicine and Addiction Medicine. Her work focuses on social emergency medicine and health equity initiatives, specifically community health worker/peer recovery programs, harm reduction services, low barrier substance use disorder treatment, care of transgender and gender nonbinary people, health care workforce diversity, and emergency department programs to address health related social needs. A leader in EM research, Dr. Samuels received the SAEM Early Investigator Award in 2023 and the ACEP Research Forum Young Investigator Award in 2022, among numerous other honors.