Website Redesign: WordPress

The Andrew Levitt Center for Social Emergency Medicine seeks a volunteer to help redesign our website on WordPress to effectively highlight our Social Emergency Medicine (SEM) research, programs, and partners and make our SEM resources easily available to healthcare practitioners and community partners with a search/filter feature.

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of emergency departments (EDs) in providing front-line medical care for our most vulnerable populations. Patients visiting the ED often have high burdens of social needs, including homelessness, food insecurity, and others. The field of Social Emergency Medicine (SEM) recognizes that the ED is uniquely situated to address these social needs.

SEM seeks to promote health equity by incorporating consideration of a patient’s social needs and larger structural context into the practice of emergency care. SEM recognizes that simply addressing a patient's medical problem – such as prescribing insulin for a diabetic whose sugar is too high – might not be enough without taking into account the larger context of that person’s life, where underlying social conditions such as lack of money to buy healthy food or medications may render the medical care inadequate. The mission of the Andrew Levitt Center for Social Emergency Medicine is to expand the scope of SEM through research, programs, and training.

The goal of this project is to redesign our website to include an intuitive, user-friendly, searchable online SEM library that will showcase successful SEM programs and provide replicable toolkits/templates for SEM programs and other resources. The SEM library will be fully accessible to the public, and all materials will be available without charge.

We have already worked with a Taproot volunteer to identify an appropriate WordPress search/filter plugin that could serve as the basis of our online SEM library. The volunteer helped us to establish a new WordPress website on Blue Host (with a temporary URL - not yet launched) and create our database of resources. We now seek assistance in designing our WordPress website to effectively highlight our SEM research/programs and installing the search/filter plugin so our target users (community hospital healthcare workers and community partners) can easily access our free resources. We currently have approximately 200 resources in our database. As the resources are used and adapted by community users, we plan to add their materials to the database as templates/examples for future users.