Dr. Keith D. Wrenn, professor of Emergency Medicine and vice chairman and residency director of the Department of Emergency Medicine, has been selected as one of 10 outstanding program directors in the nation. He will receive the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education’s Parker J. Palmer “Courage to Teach” award.
His nomination was among those of 90 other program directors in the nation.
Wrenn, who has directed the Vanderbilt program since 1992, will be accepting the award at a Feb. 11 dinner hosted by the ACGME in Chicago.
As director of Vanderbilt’s program, Wrenn is responsible for arranging and selecting applicants for residency, arranging the curriculum, mentoring and advising residents, teaching, and making sure all the requirements for accreditation of Vanderbilt’s emergency medicine residency are met.
“I think this award is actually an award for the entire residency,” Wrenn said. “Without the support of the chairman (Dr. Corey Slovis), the faculty, who are also uniformly excellent teachers, Mrs. Birdia Byars, the residency coordinator, and the chief residents (this year, Andrew McVie and Matt Hardin), I could not possibly do my job, let alone well.”
Wrenn said that faculty members like Drs. Robin Hemphill, Sally Santen and Jennifer Isenhour are also a great help in making the program successful.
“I think that anytime Vanderbilt’s name can be publicized in a positive manner (like the award) it’s good for us. I think, in particular, this may help us continue to recruit residents at the highest levels of ability.”
Wrenn is no stranger to awards at Vanderbilt and nationally. He won Vanderbilt University School of Medicine’s Shovel Award, given for excellence in clinical teaching, in 1994 and again in 2001, VUSM’s Thomas E. Brittingham Clinical Teaching Award in 1995, and the Emergency Medicine Resident’s Association Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1996.