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Dr. James Dunford is Professor Emeritus of Emergency Medicine. After completing an internship and residency in Internal Medicine at UC San Diego in 1979, Jim joined the nascent emergency medicine faculty and remained clinically active until 2015. From 1980-86, he responded to hundreds of emergencies aboard the Life Flight helicopter, the first civilian physician-staffed aeromedical program in the nation. Jim went on to become the medical director of both Life Flight and the San Diego Fire Department and established the UCSD Division of EMS. In 1988, he created and directed the UCSD emergency medicine residency training program. In 1997 he was selected as the first medical director of the City of San Diego, a position he held until 2017. In that role he helped shape the evolution of contemporary EMS care at the local, state, national and international level. Jim coordinated the City’s participation in consequential NIH trials addressing the management of sudden cardiac arrest, major trauma, acute stroke, and heart attack. As President of the San Diego Board of the American Heart Association, he championed the creation of regional systems of care for cardiac arrest (San Diego Project Heartbeat), heart attack and stroke. For his efforts to expand these systems across the western U.S., he received the AHA Western States’ Volunteer of the Year award.

Jim was among the first EMS physicians to recognize novel ways to utilize EMS resources to address complex social conditions. In 2000, he partnered with the San Diego Police Department to develop the Serial Inebriate Program to assist homeless individuals with severe alcohol use disorder. His research on SIP was recognized with the 2006 U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness National Research Award. In 2008, Jim created the Resource Access Program, a novel “community paramedic” program to assist hospital superusers, which was subsequently recognized as a model of innovation by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. In 2011, Jim partnered with the San Diego United Way to implement Project 25, demonstrating the economic and medical advantages of “Housing First”. He championed SDFD’s early adoption of handheld, cloud-based electronic charting and collaborated with the UCSD Department of Emergency Medicine on a $15M federal Beacon grant, which created the first health information exchange capable of real-time, bi-directional EMS data exchange. To better serve his complex EMS patients, Jim partnered with 211 San Diego and Father Joe’s Village to create the SD Community Information Exchange, which today links over 100 previously siloed community-based organizations to better address patients’ adverse social determinants of their health.

Jim served for years as an emergency medicine expert at both the National Quality Forum and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration and is past Chair of the California Commission on EMS. For his career of service, in 2015 he received the Outstanding Contribution in EMS award from the American College of Emergency Physicians. He retired from EMS in 2017, and in 2018 became the Medical Director of McAlister Institute, the region’s largest substance treatment program for Medi-Cal patients. He currently oversees clinical care at 16 treatment programs and is actively engaged in the opioid crisis. In 2020, Jim received the UCSD Edward A. Dickson Emeriti Professorship for ongoing contributions to the community.