Contents tagged with future of family medicine
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Encourage future health professionals with HOSA
By TAFP COO Kathy McCarthy, CAE
I had the privilege of attending the HOSA International Leadership Conference on behalf of AAFP in June. HOSA-Future Health Professionals is a global organization with a mission to promote career opportunities in the health industry and to enhance the delivery of quality health care for all people. It includes middle school and collegiate students, but most attendees at the conference were high school students. The regional, state, and international conferences include business sessions to elect their leadership, educational seminars and workshops, and competitive events and exams. This was the first live international event for the organization since 2019 and there were more than 10,000 high school students from across the country and the world at the meeting (the lines at the Starbucks were a testament to size of the gathering).
AAFP has worked with HOSA the past few years to develop an exam and competitive event focused on family medicine, and my purpose for attending the conference was to help judge the first live competition. The high school students did at least two interviews with family physicians and medical students. The interviews along with their research informed a presentation on the specialty, the educational pathway, and more. They gave their presentations to a group of their peers before going to competitive events. In Texas, we have seven regions with competitions and a statewide event that had 18 competitors in the Family Medicine Physician event.
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Volunteer with HOSA and support high school students interested in family medicine
By Samantha White
Last week TAFP staff Juleah Williams presented scholarships to winners of the family medicine competitive event at the Health Occupations Students of America – Future Health Professionals state conference in Galveston. High school students interested in health care careers presented projects at the event, which were judged by health care professionals. TAFP presented scholarships of $750, $500, and $250 to first, second, and third winners respectively.
The HOSA family medicine competitive event is sponsored by AAFP and requires high school students participating to learn about the specialty, focusing on several topics including medical education and career options, the importance of preventive medicine, financial implications, and more. Ultimately, students are asked to study the specialty as a way of deciding if it might be a possible future career choice. AAFP’s involvement is in hopes of reaching their goal to ensure that no less than 25% of medical school graduates choose family medicine by the year 2030.
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MEMBER VOICES: The future of family medicine
By Larry Kravitz, MD, and Lily Cormier
Such high hopes when it all began in 1970, with a new specialty that renamed itself and decided to take primary care seriously. Family medicine is now more than 50 years old, with 133,000 physicians in the United States. Where will it all be 50 years from now?
There is an old African proverb, “Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.” We see our medical past in terms of our victories, but we minimize our failures. So we do as well with the future; we expect to build on our successes, and don’t understand that our failures tag along and can poison the wellspring of our dreams. As long as we keep applying the template of our distorted past to our expectations of the future, we will never see it coming. The future threatens to run over us from behind as we’re squinting our gaze to a glorious distant horizon. The future is all around us right now, but it is clouded by the rose-colored lenses we insist on wearing. We don’t need a false prophet nor do we need a harbinger of doom, but there are two conflicting futures ahead and we need to embrace them both.
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Advocacy Tools
Advocacy Tools
TAFP works tirelessly to promote policies to strengthen the primary care workforce, to protect patients and ensure they have access to quality care, to foster a regulatory … more
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10 questions with AAFP’s new president-elect, Roland A. Goertz, M.D., M.B.A.
10 questions with AAFP’s new president-elect, Roland A. Goertz, M.D., M.B.A.
By Jonathan Nelson
Roland A. Goertz, M.D., M.B.A., of Waco has been elected president-elect of the American Academy of … more
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Looking back on two years of TransforMed
By Melissa Gerdes, M.D.
When I first read the Future of Family Medicine report in 2004, I was overwhelmed by the degree of change being asked of family medicine. Now, four years later, I am living in the midst of it.
When we were selected to be one of 36 practices from across the country to participate in TransforMed, my partners and I were not sure we could live up to the promises and hopes imbedded in the project. We also were concerned about dedicating the kind of time needed to implement some of the changes.
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