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In this Issue:
- Governor's Message
- Finance Committee
- Membership Committee
- Planning Committee
- Health and Public Policy Committee
- Physician Wellness
- Early Career Physicians Committee
- Resident Committee
- Student Committee
Ky B. Stoltzfus, MD, FACP, ACP Governor
Governor's Message
Dear Colleagues,
I'll begin and end this piece with a quote. Benjamin Disraeli, a 19th century British Prime Minister, said “There is no education like adversity.” Those words continue to ring true even two centuries later. We've had a serious pandemic, tumultuous election, uncertain economic times – and we continue on caring for patients and helping our communities. Through medical school and residency training most of us realized that our careers in medicine would bring joy, heartache, stress, profound relationships, and both satisfaction and dissatisfaction with our work. Who would have imagined that all of that would get packaged up into a powerful punch all in one year? And yet, we persevere and adapt, just as we've always done.
Some of you might chuckle when you consider that a year ago one of our lecturers at the Kansas Scientific meeting talked to us about how feasible and scalable it would be to conduct virtual visits (thank you Dr Yaghmai). And a year later he returned to our meeting to say “we've done it” and we can still do more. Virtual medicine has become the nature of our practice overnight and not just in patient care. This year we held our first ever virtual Kansas ACP Scientific meeting. It went pretty well! Our planning committee did a great job of learning as we go and charting a path into online continuing medical education. While we certainly hope that the pandemic is under control by next fall, we'll be ready if we need to have more virtual meetings.
I realize it's not quite the same in a virtual world. I think we all agree that there are plenty of patient encounters that are done better face to face. There is therapeutic benefit from talking with another person face to face. A Kansas ACP meeting just isn't the same when we can't chat with our friends from across the state in between sessions. The Town Hall sessions don't have as much draw when you've got ACP on one screen and the Chiefs highlight real or Instagram on another. So we'll all keep our fingers crossed and keep working hard to get back to a COVID-under-control world.
Which brings me to my final point. You hold significant power in your community in role as a physician. Please continue taking good care of your patients, but also provide sound advice to your local officials on ways we can keep the public healthy. Face masks, social distancing, hand hygiene and taking viral transmission seriously are all common sense measures and easy to achieve. Saint Francis of Assisi once wrote, “Start by doing what is necessary, then do what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”
Take care of yourselves, and your community!
Ky Stoltzfus, MD, FACP
Governor, ACP Kansas Chapter
Finance Committee
The Finance Committee will be meeting to examine our investment fund and look for opportunities to grow our reserves. The chapter remains on solid financial ground.
Angela M. Meyer, MD, FACP
Finance Committee Chair
Membership Committee
The membership committee met September 2, 2020. We discussed recruitment and retention of “Big M” members. As a group, the Governor's Council discussed this during a recent strategic planning meeting. Our goal will be to increase membership by 2 percent in the next fiscal year. I would encourage all of you to engage with your colleagues who may not be members about membership in ACP.
The other issue within the membership committee is fellowship. I have circulated names of physicians who are eligible to committee members. Going forward, I will work to make a list available so that all members may make suggestions or nominations for fellowship. One other barrier to fellowship has been the requirement of two letters of recommendation from ACP fellows. I am going to work on having a list of active fellows willing to write letters. If you are a fellow and are willing to write letters of recommendation for potential fellows, please let me or a membership committee member know.
Regards,
Scott Smiley, MD, FACP
Membership Committee Chair
Planning Committee
The ACP Kansas Chapter just wrapped up the annual scientific meeting on October 22-23rd. This year was unique in that the conference was completely virtual. While we truly missed seeing all of you in person, we are happy to report that the meeting was still a great success with the bonus of being able to stay in your pajamas a little longer than what is socially acceptable!
I want to extend special gratitude to the many people who made this meeting possible - our planning committee and administrative team especially. They were instrumental in converting this meeting from a live to virtual format. As well as our speakers who were so patient in working with us on recording and sometimes re-recording their lectures and learning the new software. And not to forget our judges and resident/student presenters for the poster competition. It was certainly more of an involved process than in years past, but everyone rose to the challenge, and the poster competition went off without a hitch. We really appreciate everyone's flexibility and hard work in making that a success.
Congratulations to our poster winners:
Best Resident Presentation: Christopher Williams, MD: Crystals Causing Confusion?: A Case of Crowned Dens Syndrome
Best Student Presentation: Conner Bowman, MS4: Should Antibiotics Be Started Within One Hour for Septic Patients?
Chien Liu Infectious Disease Award: Tie
Maire Okoniewski, DO: Scrofula of the Abdomen
Victoria Poplin, MD: The Effectiveness of a ‘Suppression Bundle’ to Improve HIV Virologic Suppression in an Outpatient Infectious Disease Clinic
Congratulations to our other awardees. We awarded Ammar Al-Obaidi, MD and John Fritzlen, MD with the Delp Resident of the Year Award, David Morgan, MD, FACP with the Internist Award, Benjamin Quick, MD, MPH with the Early Career Physician of the Year Award, and Issac Opole, MBChB, PhD, FACP with the Chapter Laureate Award. Be sure to view the Town Hall/Awards ceremony if you would like to watch everyone receive their awards.
We had some great content at the meeting this year including two talks with our current ACP President, Dr. Jacqueline Fincher, a panel on COVID-19 with local experts, and highlights of current Public Health Issues by Secretary of Health & Environment, Dr. Lee Norman and our very own Dr. Ben Quick. Attendees can now view the entire conference including lectures that were live and pre-recorded by clicking on the meeting hub link and signing in under your ACP account. If you have not yet registered for the meeting, but you want access to this content, you may do so by going to the ACP College Store and purchasing the meeting (which is free of cost). You can purchase the meeting for six months from the date of the meeting, and CME/MOC is available to claim for one year from the meeting date. Please be advised that you may only claim CME/MOC one time. Please contact Denise Lantz at dlantz@kmsonline.org if you have any questions about claiming CME/MOC or registration.
If you are interested in getting involved in this exciting committee, we are currently looking for new members to start planning our next meeting for 2021. Please email dlantz@kmsonline.org or mtaylor7@kumc.edu if you would like more information.
I think that's all for now. Wishing you Happy Holidays. Stay safe and stay healthy. Hope to see you all live next year!
Sincerely,
Melissa Taylor, MD
Planning Committee Chair
Health and Public Policy Committee
Advocacy for our patients and profession continues to be of utmost importance as we near the end of 2020. While ACP continues to advocate on internists behalf, it is important legislators hear from our physicians. ACP has developed a virtual advocacy toolkit to easily engage with members of Congress and advocate for policies that benefit our patients and communities.
Additionally, our chapter has several upcoming advocacy events:
- ACP is hosting an “Advocacy in Medicine” panelist event December 7, 2020 to discuss how to become involved in advocacy on the state and federal level. View the flyer here.
- ACP and other specialty societies will take part in the Kansas Medical Society's Advocacy Day, held January 27, 2020. See event details and registration here.
To learn more about current legislative priorities, visit ACP's advocacy website .
Sincerely,
Benjamin Quick, MD, MPH
Health & Public Policy Chair
Physician Wellness
Physician Well Being seems far from the minds of many right now. Consumed with finding an extra hospital bed, donning more PPE, swabbing more patients, and answering more phone calls about exposure, quarantine, isolation.
But right now, I'd like you to take a moment and BREATHE. Breathe again. Then once more.
Now pause….
There are countless things I could tell you about well being right now, but I believe we all need to hear YOU ARE ENOUGH. You have been in this pandemic battle for eight long months—whether directly in patient care or supporting your colleagues that are. From lock downs, to restrictions lifted, and now back to the gruesome vertical trajectory of cases when everyone is exhausted, you are not in this alone. THANK YOU for all that you are doing to keep Kansans safe, healthy and cared for, whether suffering from COVID-19 or the numerous other illnesses we battle each day. I wrote a similar message in April, but it seems much more applicable to Kansas now than it did then. If you have immediate needs, thoughts of harm, or need to speak with someone directly, please reach out to the KS chapter leadership or myself at seschase@gmail.com so we can help.
With the hope of vaccination on the horizon, I'm hopeful we can move on to other subjects as the spring nears! We are collaborating with KS ACP Early Career Physicians to work on a mentoring platform for residents and members in the chapter. Stay tuned for more exciting details to come!
These are trying times, we are in it together. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I'm grateful for each of you as colleagues, thank you for all that you do. Stay well, friends.
Segen E. Smith Chase, MD, FACP
Wellness Champion
Early Career Physicians Committee
The Early Career Physician Committee is always looking for new members! If you are interested, then please email kcarter@kumc.edu We hope you enjoyed our talk at the KsACP meeting and are hoping to have an event in the spring. We look forward to connecting with you all soon.
Kimberly Richardson, MD, FACP
Early Career Physicians Chair
Resident Committee
In 2020, the resident committee has been working on increasing opportunities for residents to grow in their careers through ACP. This was the second consecutive year of the Resident Physician and Medical Student Mentorship Program. It is a great opportunity for residents to become mentors to students and increase student interest in Internal Medicine. We had 52 residents and 16 medical students from throughout Kansas present posters at the Kansas ACP conference this year. We are continuing to work on further events to encourage ACP membership as residents transition to early career physicians.
Nikki Miller, MD
KsACP Resident Representative
Student Committee
We believe that the best way to get physicians involved in the ACP is to get them involved as medical students and demonstrate our interest and investment in their careers from the beginning. Steps we've taken this academic year toward this goal include:
- Expanding our resident - student mentorship program. This fall, we paired 64 medical students with 28 internal medicine residents on the KUMC Kansas City campus. We are in the process of working with leaders from the Wichita and Salina campuses to expand the program to their residents and students as well.
- Planning, organizing, and executing a virtual Advocacy in Medicine panelist event on December 7 about “how medical students, residents, and practicing physicians can get involved on state & national levels.”
- Partnering with more student organizations to advertise ACP student membership including the Internal Medicine M3 clerkship, all M4 IM elective rotations, the IM Student Interest Group, a student-run education podcast (Decoding Dx), and all ACP-related emails and sign-ups.
Brianna Coogle
KsACP Student Representative
Mark Your Calendar:
January 27, 2021 – Advocacy Day, Topeka, KS
April 29-May 1, 2021 – Internal Medicine 2021 Virtual Meeting
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