Welcome to the Emergency Medicine Residency Program

The Department of Emergency Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine is fully committed to its residency training program. We are very proud of our heritage as the oldest emergency medicine (EM) residency in the Southeast and one of the founding programs in the country.

Hundreds of Wake Forest graduates are practicing EM across the country. Our alumni are chairs of departments, residency directors, leaders of professional groups, emergency medical services directors and practicing emergency physicians in academic and community centers. Although we are an established program, we continually strive to stay on the cutting edge of clinical emergency medicine, education and research.

The cornerstone of our program is outstanding clinical training. Our university and community training sites offer a combined emergency department census approaching 200,000 patient visits per year and growing. The primary training site, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, is the tertiary care center for northwest North Carolina and southern Virginia and is the teaching hospital for the School of Medicine. The Medical Center, which consistently ranks among the nation’s 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 the Medical Center), 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 learning environment in which to hone their EM skills and knowledge. Our didactic education program is outstanding and continues to implement novel learning strategies. We offer scheduled conference time each week, and our faculty cover the ED so all residents may attend.

The friendly community established by the people at Wake Forest is the highlight of our residency program. Our faculty are outstanding teachers, clinicians, researchers and mentors. We recruit faculty and residents who excel in the areas of interpersonal communication, work ethic and compassion. Our program is under constant evaluation by our residents and faculty to help identify ways in which we can improve. The residents are actively involved in decisions that affect the training program. The combination of an excellent clinical environment and strong academic endeavors makes our training program one of the best in the country. We welcome you to visit us to see what Wake Forest and Winston-Salem have to offer.

Cedric Lefebvre, MD
Residency Program Director
Department of Emergency Medicine