September-October 2006

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S A E M

Newsletter of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine September/October 2006 Volume XVIII, Number 5

PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

901 N. Washington Ave. Lansing, MI 48906-5137 (517) 485-5484 saem@saem.org www.saem.org

The Future of Emergency Medical Care in the US – IOM Report

Meeting the Needs of the Membership

Carey Chisholm, MD Chair, SAEM IOM Task Force University of Indiana

If you attended the SAEM Business Meeting in San Francisco this year, you may have been awake enough to hear me talk about SAEM areas of emphasis for the coming year. One of those areas of emphasis is membership recruitment and retention. We have been James Hoekstra, MD fortunate at SAEM in that we have experienced steady growth in a number of areas, not the least of which is the growth of the Research Fund, which I highlighted in the last Newsletter. We have noticed over the past several years that resident membership and student membership has been steadily growing, but active membership roles are relatively stable over the same time period. This is concerning, to say the least, and alarming to some. If we informally poll our residency programs and leadership, however, there is general agreement that residency programs and clinical faculty numbers are growing. Growth in patient volume, growth in the number of residency programs, and growth in affiliated hospital relationships would predict an increase in faculty, especially clinical faculty members. Yet, the SAEM active membership roles have not been increasing. This leads to the following obvious questions: 1. Are we doing an adequate job of recruiting new members? 2. Do residents and/or faculty recognize the value of SAEM membership? 3. Are we meeting the needs of our present members? 4. Are we providing solid value to SAEM members, especially with regard to the Annual Meeting, the website, AEM, and the Newsletter. 5. Are there services that SAEM could provide that we presently are not providing? The Board of Directors started working on the first two questions last year, under Glenn Hamilton’s leadership. We established a membership subcommittee of the Board that was charged with finding ways to augment member recruitment. The subcommittee made specific recommendations, which were approved by the Board, and put into action last fall. These included the following financial incentives to recruit new members and increase faculty participation: 1. The Institutional Membership Discount: If the entire faculty from a residency program is signed up as SAEM members, the institution receives a

By now, virtually all SAEM members should be aware of the IOM Committee Report on the Future of Emergency Medical Care in the United States, released in June 2006. If you aren’t aware of the IOM report’s recommendations, you are likely doing yourself and your specialty a disservice. Links to the report may be found on the SAEM web page. SAEM has an IOM Task Force whose objectives revolve around analysis of the IOM report, preparation of informational pieces for the Board of Directors, and development of specific recommendations as instructed by the Board. Due to time constraints, the Task Force was divided into several “Rapid Response Writing Groups” (RRWG) to coincide with SAEM’s mission as applicable to IOM report recommendations. The RRWG include Basic Science Research, Clinical Science Research, Education, EMS-Disaster Preparedness, Pediatric EM, and Critical Care. The IOM is conducting four regional meetings, each with a theme applicable to the overall report. The first will occur at Primary Children’s Medical Center in Salt Lake City on Thursday, September 7, 2006 and will focus on Pediatric EM and Rural EM issues. This will be followed on Friday, October 27 at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago (Workforce and Operations IT), Thursday, November 2 at Tulane University Medical Center in New Orleans (EMS and Disaster preparedness) and the final capstone meeting at IOM headquarters at the National Academies of Sciences Building in Washington DC on December 11. The final report will be available in March 2007. SAEM will provide representatives at these regional meetings to address mission related items. In addition, existing committees and interest groups may be asked to develop material or strategies in their area of expertise for internal or external use. Several of the IOM recommendations involve long-term objectives directly in line with our research and educational mission, so there will be ample opportunity for member participation. One notable area underrepresented in the IOM Report involves geriatrics. We are all aware of the increasing geriatric patient population with their complex medical problems and unique requirements. Once identified, the Geriatrics Interest Group prepared a comprehensive and well referenced report for the Board of Directors that included specific recommenda-

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“to improve patient care by advancing research and education in emergency medicine” 1


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September-October 2006 by Society for Academic Emergency Medicine - Issuu