PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE to Members By Dr. Jessica Triche 2020–2021 NCAFP President
~ 2020 INAUGURAL ADDRESS ~
The Awesome Power of Mentorship in Family Medicine Well...this was not the speech I imagined giving a year ago! Thanks 2020! Thanks to COVID, I couldn’t hang out with my friends and colleagues for our yearly misadventures at Grove Park Inn! I truly missed trying to sneak in my cell phone and contraband alcohol into the spa this year. But I’m sure we can still make the upcoming year fun. It has to be better than 2020! 2020 was tough. We, as family physicians, have been on the COVID frontlines, putting our lives at risk in order to care for our patients. We’ve had to explain that science is real and that we practice evidence-based medicine. As family physicians, we must weed out the crap. We owe it to our patients to speak the truth. We are all still in this fight together. We have learned a lot so far. We learned how to wear a mask all day, every day and have adjusted to not being able to hug our patients. We’ve become tech savvy and navigated virtual visits, enjoying seeing our patients relaxing at home (sometimes too relaxed). Most importantly, we learned that you should probably not wear PJ pants during virtual visits, just in case you need to attend to your kids burning toast! Trust me...I know. If we thought COVID was enough “badness” for 2020, we were wrong. George Floyd was killed by police who knelt on his neck while he cried out for his
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mother. This is nothing new. It’s a continuation of how our society functions on implicit bias. But this year Black Lives Matter became a movement and protests erupted across the country. Family physicians and students/residents have spoken up and became involved in this movement, marching side by side with our patients and community members to protest systemic racism. The AAFP asked the White House to declare racism a public health emergency, stating that it impacts mental health, chronic illnesses, maternal and infant mortality rates, overall health outcomes, and life expectancy. The NCAFP echoed this in a statement of our own. I know all of us can think of patients who are victims of this systemic racism. These are our patients, and it is our job to take action! We can talk about racism and inequities as it relates to medicine, but we also need to talk about how it
The North Carolina Family Physician
