Message from Board Liaison and ACEP President-elect

Thank you all for all of your hard work in what has continued to be a difficult year with a pandemic, changes in the job market, challenging workforce projections, and several natural disasters that have impacted our practice and well-being. We continue to evolve as a specialty, and I firmly believe that we’re going to come out of this difficult time even stronger. Thank you for the time, energy, and service you continue to give to your patients, your communities, and this College as we get through this together.

By the time you read this, I am hoping most people will have received their COVID booster. We are looking forward to having a hybrid meeting in October and I hope to see some of you in-person in Boston. Our ED volumes are back to baseline (or even higher than they were pre-COVID), the job market is starting to open back up, and we are seeing some light at the end of the tunnel.

ACEP has made significant progress on the workforce front. If you have not checked it out yet, please visit www.ACEP.org/workforce to see what we’ve been working so hard on all summer, the framework and 5 pillars we have established as our approach to workforce, and updates on our progress.

ACEP has also undertaken a major strategic planning effort over the past few months. We have developed separate action teams to address specific strategic missions for the College and the future of our specialty. One of those action teams is dedicated to new healthcare delivery models, expanding demand for our services, and exploring new ways to practice EM outside the 4 walls of a hospital. Leaders in this group will be discussing free-standing emergency departments, hybrid urgent care/ emergency department models, telemedicine, and alternative practice sites and models. I anticipate we will be creating a task force this fall or winter to establish specific tactics to flush out these strategies and see where ACEP can advocate in this arena on behalf of our members. My time working in freestanding emergency departments helped me see a new vision of what emergency medicine can be, how we can utilize our skills to meet patients where they’re at, and how we can shape the future of our practice.

Thank you for allowing me to serve as your Board liaison for the past several years. It has been a pleasure and I hope to catch up with some of you in Boston!

Gillian Schmitz, MD, FACEP