Divisions

At the pediatric emergency medicine division, we love caring for children and families! Aside from our state-of-the-art facility which opened in 2010, we have a fantastic group of faculty, pediatric-specific nurses, and pediatric resources at our disposal. In order to achieve the best care, we believe that children require specialists and equipment designed to care for their unique needs. All of the emergency medicine physicians working in the pediatric emergency center are board-certified. They have completed additional training in pediatric emergency medicine, making our team especially well prepared to care for children.

The ultrasound division at the UK College of Medicine Emergency Medicine Department is led by Jacob Avila, MD. He is the creator of www.CoreUltrasound.com, an online ultrasound resource that includes 5 Minute Sono, Ultrasound of the Week, and the Ultrasound Podcast. Additionally, he is part of the UltrasoundGEL.org podcast. Dr. Avila has won multiple awards, including 2019 ACEP rookie lecturer of the year and the ACEP Innovation in Clinical Ultrasound Education in 2018.

Our team currently provides clinical pharmacy services daily, to help optimize patient care, serves as non-physician teaching faculty for the department of emergency medicine and collaborates on numerous clinical research projects.

Emergency department pharmacists at the University of Kentucky respond to all traumas, codes, and stroke alerts as well as being available for any other clinical consults. Our hope is to complement your learning experience through enhancing provision of effective, safe, and evidence-based medications practices.

Our toxicology division has the only inpatient consultation service available in the state of Kentucky. We also are developing an outpatient consultation service for everything related to toxicology.​

Dr. Akpunonu and other hyperbaric certified physicians run the only 24-hour hyperbaric chamber in the region. We accept patients from Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia, and all over Kentucky.

We are excited to announce 2019-2020 was the inaugural year for our global emergency medicine (GEM) fellowship. The GEM fellowship is uniquely designed to be tailored to the fellow’s career interest— including but not limited to disaster medicine, humanitarian response, public health, emergency medicine development. The fellowship can be completed in one or two years depending on if an advanced Master’s Degree is pursued. If a one-year fellowship is pursued, expect to spend 5-6 months internationally.

The UK College of Medicine Department of Emergency Medicine believes strongly that the adaptation of experiential learning via high fidelity simulation is a crucial component of a well-rounded training environment for the emergency medicine professional. In that spirit, we are active stakeholders in the new UK Healthcare Simulation Center that opened in late 2018. Our residents are regularly involved in a variety of simulation activities throughout the academic year as both learners and educators.

The division of critical care is dedicated to ensuring quality critical care from the time patients enter the emergency department to the time they leave the department and are transported to the ICU. We are dedicated to comprehensive critical care, from neuro-intensive care to airway emergencies, sepsis, post-arrest care, advanced hemodynamic monitoring, critical care ultrasound, and beyond.