Rural, Tribal, & Mountain Medicine ElectiveS

Advocate Christ is a high volume, high acuity, tertiary care medical center. We believe this training environment is one of the greatest strengths of our program but understand that many of our residents may go on to practice in lower resource environments. In an effort to best prepare our residents for their individual futures in Emergency Medicine, we initially created the Rural/Mountain Medicine elective rotation with the help of one of our graduates, Dr. Malie Kopplin (‘99) who practices in EM in Ketchum, Idaho.

St. Luke’s Wood River Medical Center in Ketchum, Idaho, is a Level IV trauma center with 25 inpatient beds, a 10 bed ED, and is designated a critical access hospital. There is no ICU or in house cath lab, and the closest cardiac and stroke centers are a 2 hour drive away. The hospital serves a large catchment area with socially and economically diverse patient populations. Rotating at St. Luke’s provides an unusual opportunity to practice stabilizing sick patients prior to helicopter or ground transport and requires the development of a new set of skills allocating limited resources and caring for patients with extremely limited sub-specialist support.

On their days off, our residents enjoy the beauty of Sun Valley and life in a mountain town!

In recent years, our residents have created additional “away” experiences to better prepare them for their careers. Recent experiences include rotations in Sitka, Alaska and a Public Health rotation at the Tséhootsooí Medical Center on the Navajo Reservation in Fort Defiance, Arizona. This hospital site is located in Northeast Arizona on the Navajo Reservation, along the border of Arizona and New Mexico. The hospital itself is a limited-access remote hospital with an 11-bed ER. More info about the rotation can be found HERE on our blog.