History of Emergency Medicine at UICOMP

The Department of Emergency Medicine was approved by the Illinois Board of Higher Education in 2014. Prior to this, Emergency Medicine had grown and flourished as a Section of the Department of Surgery.

The UICOMP Emergency Medicine Residency Program has a much long history. It was established in 1980 and has been a fully accredited program since 1983, the same year we graduated our first class. The program started with four residents per class and currently has 12 residents per class in the three-year program.

We have a long and growing history in medical student education. In 1994 the first M-4 Emergency Medicine Elective was offered and in 2013 a two-week, required M-3 Emergency Medicine experience began. In 2014 we started offering an M-2 “immersion” experience as part of their Introduction to Clinical Medicine.

The University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria is one of the four regional campus for the University of Illinois College of Medicine. This regional site was established in 1970 and one of the goals of the regional sites was to increase the number of physicians serving patients outside of the Chicago area. This has worked well to increase quality of emergency care in central Illinois with more than 50 of our residency graduates staying to practice emergency medicine in local area hospitals.