Rumblings President’s Message / David L. Diehl, MD, FASGE, AGAF

“So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish”

The Importance of Mentoring

PSG/SOCIAL: attending physicians at one’s own training program work very hard to train GI fellows, but this is generally different from a mentoring relationship.

The PSG is launching a mentorship program for GI Fellows and early career GI physicians. We will be reaching out to those of you who would like to participate in this project.

Well, the time has come. The end of my 2-year term as President of the PSG is here. I am grateful to the members of the PSG Board for their ongoing support of our efforts to continue the greatness of the PSG. I have enjoyed having the privilege of leading the PSG and doing what I can to make sure that the PSG remains a viable and important resource for Gastroenterology in Pennsylvania. I would like to thank Jessica Winger for her hard work at organizing and attending to all the details that go in to putting on the annual meeting. And of course, my sincere appreciation goes out to Audrey Dean, our Executive Director. I have met nearly weekly with Audrey for the past 2 years to keep all the balls in the air, and to make sure that all our initiatives could be shepherded into reality.

As I look back at my 2-year term, there is much that I am proud of. Certainly, the accomplishments listed below would not be possible without the collaboration and guidance of my colleagues on the board, and to them, I am very grateful. But I would like to bring everyone’s attention to these projects and initiatives that occurred in the PSG over the past 2 years:

1. The great success of the 2022 Annual meeting in Hershey: Our course director, Shyam Thakkar, put together an outstanding line-up of speakers. It was great to be able to meet in person again for the first time since before the COVID pandemic in 2019. Our ability to have an in person meeting really underscored what these gatherings are about: not just great academic content but also providing the opportunity to network again with our old friends as well as new acquaintances in the PSG. Not to mention providing a family-friendly venue so that physicians can bring their families along for the meeting.

Many of us have benefitted from mentors. Perhaps some of us have suffered for the lack of a mentor during our education or training. Mentors can have a lifelong impact on their trainees, but the relationship does not go in only one direction. Mentors can get as much benefit and satisfaction as their mentees can. Gastroenterology, like other areas of medical training is akin to a “guild”, where the experienced take the novice under their wing to train them in the arts of their chosen field. All GI fellows, including us way back when, had trainers and coaches that typically were staff gastroenterologists at our program. Many medical schools provide for mentor relationships, but this is less common in GI training. Certainly,

I have been lucky enough to have some important mentors in my medical career. The first was assigned to me when I was a firstyear medical student. His name was Eugene “Skip” Felmar, MD and he was a Family Practice attending in the San Fernando Valley area of Southern California. I enjoyed going out to his office and shadowing him closely while he saw outpatients, rounded on inpatients, and did office procedures. Beyond gaining valuable insight into the practice of medicine, I found out why his nickname was “Skip” after he took me out on his sailboat which he kept docked at the Los Angeles harbor. Skip Felmar became a role model for me, and the mentor-mentee relationship was mutually rewarding.

Another highly impactful mentor that I had was someone that I chose myself. Dick Kozarek, MD was (and continued on page 2 continued on page 2

2. The Annual Meeting will be back in the western part of the state for the first time in years, and in Pittsburgh for the first time in more than a decade. Many thanks are due to this year’s course director Dr. Gursimran Kochhar as well as the Education Committee. We have had many meetings over the past months to hone the schedule, and we are looking forward to an outstanding meeting.

PSG/SOCIAL: @PAGastroSoc

President’s Message

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3. Creation and development of the PSG Webinar series: This has offered a wonderful educational opportunity for our membership, in addition to providing a CME opportunity, and it also feeds our Social Media efforts. Some of the content will be archived on the Website for future availability. There have been 5 Webinars in the past year, two of which moderated by PSG physicians, and three more with industry sponsorship. More are planned in the future. Of course, we welcome any ideas of topics for these Webinars.

4. PSG Mentorship Program: Mentorship is such an important part of what we do as physicians, and we are blessed to have an outstanding cadre of gastroenterologists in this state. I have created a program to link Mentors to Mentees in a variety of areas in GI including clinical practice, advocacy, and many others. While we are just getting this off the ground, I am hopeful that this will be an important service of the PSG to our membership and trainees for a long time to come.

5. PSG Website improvements: It has been several years since our PSG Website had an upgrade. We have been working on this with the IT department and hope to finalize these improvements before the end of the year.

6. We expanded membership to West Virginia physicians: This was a suggestion from Dr. Thakkar, and since its inception, several West Virginia gastroenterologists and gastroenterology fellows have joined the PSG. Having the PSG Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh will certainly continue to promote membership among our West Virginia colleagues and serve to expand PSG further.

7. PSG-sponsored Research Grant Competition:

This initiative was created by the PSG Board and sets aside $25,000 to fund 2 grants in the following areas:

(1) Increasing access and utilization of colorectal cancer screening, and

(2) Improving value in endoscopic care delivery. We will be funding our first grant this year, and the grant winner will be invited to present their research at the Annual Meeting the following year.

8. PSG Co-Sponsorship (with Medtronic) of the annual video capsule endoscopy course: It was held this past March in Danville and was well attended by faculty and fellows from many hospitals in Pennsylvania. This was nicely organized by Dr. Harshit Khara, and led by Dr. David Haas, who is recognized as a leader in this field. Our plans are to reprise this on an annual basis.

9. PSG Membership Group Discount Program:

The PSG has developed a program to promote membership by allowing a group discount for multiple members from the same practice. A few groups have taken advantage of this, and we hope to increase the number of members through this program as more practices learn about it.

10. Increased Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) awareness: The PSG Board composed and approved a DEI statement for the PSG for the first time in its history. While this is a big step, more is needed to be done. The PSG is committed to pursuing goals of inclusion and will be looking to increase diversity in membership and board representation going forward.

Some special acknowledgments are in order. I would like to thank David Sass for nominating me to the PSG board so many years ago, Richard Moses and Wilson Jackson for providing inspiration for leadership in this role, and Ravi Ghanta for his unwavering support and help to me in his role as immediate past President. I also am grateful to our very active board members for their significant time commitment. The Education Committee in particular has been very active with ad hoc meetings to drive forward several of the initiatives and projects listed above.

The future of the PSG is stronger than ever, and we hope to continue to drive membership with increased social media engagement, particularly with inclusion of GI fellows through Pennsylvania and West Virginia.