Jeff Pothof, MD, FACEP
President's Message, November 2019

Dear Wisconsin Emergency Physicians,

I wanted to use this month’s column to update you on our participation in the 2019 Annual ACEP Council Meeting that occurred late last month.

For those that may not be aware ACEP’s annual council meeting is the process by which the college determines both it’s leaders for the next year as well as the direction of the college by listening to and adopting resolutions that direct the board of directors as to what they should be committing resources to and working on.  The council is made up of councilors from every state.  Each state has councilors allocated based on total state chapter members.  The council also includes representation from the college’s sections as well as EMRA.

This year our Wisconsin Chapter co-authored two resolutions.  The first resolution was aimed at increasing awareness of implicit bias among physicians and requiring ACEP to create and make available online implicit bias training free to all ACEP members.  The second resolution we co-authored was aimed at requiring ACEP to develop a policy statement in favor of physician salary and benefit package equity and transparency.  Both resolutions were adopted by the council.  The WACEP board became involved with these two resolutions based on recent data that continues to show disparities in medicine especially as it pertains to compensation of women and minorities.  We feel this issue is important to providers practicing in Wisconsin and were please that the council agreed to devote more attention and training of providers on this issue.

There were many other important discussions this year on an array of topics from private equity companies acquiring medical practices and the impact on the practice of emergency medicine to ACEP supporting emergency physician’s compensation during contract transitions.  We also adopted a resolution that would require ACEP to issue a statement that strongly supports vaccination by any person detained by ICE or ICE contracted facilities and a resolution that opposed legislation requiring reporting of naloxone prescriptions to state PDMPs. 

This year the council elected the president elect Dr. Mark Rosenberg as well as the college’s new board members and council vice speaker.

If you are interested in learning more about ACEP council I encourage you to visit this site: https://www.acep.org/how-we-serve/council/.

If any of you are interested or have questions about how your Wisconsin chapter interfaces with national ACEP, or desire to become more involved in setting the direction of our specialty and improving our professional lives please reach out to myself or any of our board members “HERE” (insert email link).  Likewise, please share with colleagues of your group who are not yet ACEP members the work the college does to preserve and promote our specialty.  We’d be happy to discuss ACEP council or any of our other initiatives we are working on to improve our specialty with any of you.