A second-year resident in the Wayne State University Department of Emergency Medicine will serve on the editorial board of Academic Emergency Medicine for as part of the journal’s Resident-in-Training program.
Courtney Wechsler, M.D., was accepted to serve as one of two resident editor positions beginning next month. She will serve a one-year term.
“We are thrilled Dr. Courtney Wechsler accepted our invitation to join the editorial board of Academic Emergency Medicine from extraordinarily competitive pool of applicants this year,” said AEM Associate Editor Mark Mycyk, M.D., an Emergency Medicine physician at Cook County Health in Chicago who directs the resident-in-training editor program.
“Dr. Wechsler's talent and energy will serve our journal and our readers well. The specialty of Emergency Medicine is fortunate to have so many curious and enthusiastic residents like her interested in this program. During her one year-term on the AEM editorial board, she will be busy with all aspects involved in the dissemination of scholarly content that impact the practice of emergency medicine, including peer review, editing and other journal duties that promote meaningful scientific discovery,” he said.
In addition to experiencing the duties involved in journal editing, the resident editors will participate in a mentored curriculum to learn about all aspects of publication ethics.
“I’m looking forward to learning how to truly dissect and understand research from a whole new perspective,” Dr. Wechsler said. “I’m not someone who’s ever been incredibly invested in developing my own research studies, so a majority of what I’ve learned about the research process has been through research requirements in medical school and residency, as well as through journal clubs in residency.”
Dr. Wechsler served as an ad hoc article reviewer for the journal last fall. “Even just performing a review of one article was incredibly eye-opening and taught me even more about really dissecting presented research, digging into the resources and going beyond just what’s written on those few pages to really understand the project and the presented results,” she said. “I’m excited to learn even more about what truly makes a project or article great. These skills will not only serve me, my patients and my practice as they will allow me to continue to grow clinically, but as someone very interested in medical education I feel this experience will also allow me to become a better mentor within the medical education community to all of the medical students, residents, fellows and even attendings I will have the honor of working with in the future.”
She hopes to begin an Obstetrics and Gynecology residency after finishing the three-year Emergency Medicine residency at Detroit Receiving Hospital.
“My interest in both fields really overlaps. I’m excited that they’re both very procedural specialties, often with high acuity and the need to think and act quickly in critical scenarios. You’re often working with very vulnerable populations on some of the most intense days of their lives, and you can frequently see immediate results of your interventions,” she said. “I’m very interested in improving Obstetrics and Gynecology within the emergency department, especially in regard to miscarriage management, as well as utilizing the training we get in Emergency Medicine to improve pain management during procedural interventions within the field of Obstetrics and Gynecology.”
Her long-term career goal is to develop an abortion training fellowship “because a formalized fellowship program for physicians in specialties besides Obstetrics and Gynecology and Family Medicine doesn’t currently exist and I believe we need as many willing, able and educated providers in the fight for abortion justice as possible,” she said.