Complete Story
11/07/2023
ACEP Council Experience
CPT Katey Osborne, MD
The ACEP Council meeting occurs annually before the ACEP Scientific Assembly, and this year, I was afforded the opportunity to serve as councilor for our Government Services Chapter. Advocacy is an aspect of medicine that I had yet to participate in, and I was enlightened by the experience. We have the unique opportunity to be part of a chapter that includes four past presidents who were eager to share their expertise on navigating the council meeting. The college put out the resolutions in September for any member to review and give comments on. As a group, councilors and alternate councilors met to discuss how to best advocate and represent our chapter as military emergency physicians – an aspect not often thought about!
Our chapter members authored three different resolutions on “Metric Shaming,” “Uncompensated Required Training,” and “Taking a Position Against the Use of Excited Delirium.” Resolution 50 (23) on metric shaming was referred to the board of directors for review. The aim of this resolution was for ACEP to create policies and practices to prevent release of unblinded metric-related productivity information about individual emergency physicians. The other two resolutions were passed. Resolution 55 (23) for uncompensated required training advocated for the reduction of redundant training as well as fair market compensation and protected time for completing required training. Lastly, Resolution 47 (23) advocated for ACEP to clarify its position against the use of the term “excited delirium” and lack of endorsement for the 2009 white paper on excited delirium.
Another aspect of the ACEP Council Meeting is voting for our new president-elect, speaker & vic- speaker, and board. Our new president-elect is Dr. Alison Haddock. She has served on the ACEP Board since 2017 and is currently an associate professor of EM for Baylor College of Medicine. Our new speaker is Dr. Melissa Costello who previously served as our vice-speaker. It’s commonplace for the vice-speaker to have a follow-on term as speaker. Dr. Michael McCrea will be serving as the new vice-speaker. Lastly, for our board of directors, Drs. James Shoemaker, Chadd Kraus, Abhi Mehrotra, and Henry Pitzele have been elected.
Being a part of the ACEP Council Meeting this year was an incredible experience, and being able to advocate for positive change in our specialty on a national level is important. I hope to be involved with more advocacy in the forthcoming years!
