Welcome to the STFM Messenger Online
The STFM Messenger is the official news publication of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine.
Each month, members with e-mail addresses on file with STFM will receive an e-mail with links to the Messenger's online stories. Members will be also be able to access the Messenger's current issue as well as its archives on the STFM Web site at www.stfm.org/Messenger.
We welcome your feedback on our member newsletter; send your ideas and comments to Traci Nolte, tnolte@stfm.org.
The Annual STFM Business Meeting held on Friday, May 2 in Baltimore, Md, began with the announcement of officer elections. Elected to the STFM Board were President-Elect Terrence Steyer, MD, Medical University of South Carolina; Secretary-Treasurer Alison Dobbie, MD, University of Texas Southwestern; and Member-at-Large Deborah Taylor, PhD, Central Maine Medical Center, Lewiston, Me. To view a list of the current STFM Board of Directors, click here.
Annual Spring Conference in Baltimore
To the 1,000+ attendees at the STFM Annual Spring
Conference April 29-May 4 in Baltimore, thank you for attending. We
appreciate your support and participation. A great number of interesting sessions focusing around the patient-centered medical home and ample time for networking with colleagues made this conference highly rated by attendees. We hope you will make plans
to submit and join us again next year at the Annual Spring Conference
in Denver online Call for Papers will be available at
www.stfm.org in mid June.
Enjoy these photo highlights from this year’s annual meeting.
From left to right: Karen Connell, MS, University of Illinois; Jenny Walker, MD, MSW, MPH, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Crystal Cash, MD, Cook County-Loyola-Provident FMRP, Chicago take a few moments to catch up with each other during a refreshment break immediately following the opening plenary presented by Richard Wender, MS. His plenary "Improving Acess to High Quality, Affordable Care–How to Eliminate Medical Homelessness" kicked off a whole series of sessions focusing on the patient-centered medical home.
STFM Board Member at Large Deborah Witt, MD, (left) Thomas Jefferson University, visits with a first-time conference attendee, during the welcoming reception at the Annual Spring Conference. The two met earlier that evening at the New Member/First-Time Attendee Orientation session held every year at the conference to welcome and familiarize new members to the conference.
Janet Townsend, MD, Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center talks with a conference attendees during exhibit hours. Albert Einstein College of Medicine was one of 7 Regional Partners for this year's Annual Spring Conference in Baltimore.Thanks to all our Regional Partners for their support of the conference: Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, NY; Eastern Virginia Medical School; Georgetown University; University of Buffalo; Underwood Memorial Hospital Family Medicine Residency, Woodbury, NJ; University of Maryland; Virginia Commonwealth University
Special Topic Breakfasts provide great small-group discussion. This well-attended breakfast rountable centered around the topic "A Seventh Competency for Rural Practice." This year's Special Topic Breakfast session gave attendees their choice of 49 different topics.
Posters are always a popular presentation format at the Annual Spring Conference. More than 180 posters were presented within the two poster sessions held this year.
STFM Award Winners
The STFM Recognition Award was presented to Laurence Bauer, MSW, MEd (center holding award). Mr Bauer has been a constant, driving, and dynamic force behind the STFM Northeast Region Meeting. He has raised more than $2.5 million in funding to provide a unique, valued educational experience to more than 4,000 students (through full-support scholarships) and more than 5,000 faculty and residents.
The STFM Excellence in Education Award winner was Kent Sheets, PhD. Dr Sheets has been active in numerous STFM activities, including serving as project director on the Curricular Guidelines for Third-year Family Medicine Clerkships Project, first and second editions of the Preceptor Education Project, and the Predoctoral Resource Network Project. Most recently, he served as curriculum consultant for the Family Medicine Curriculum Resource Project. Within STFM, he was a member of the Education Committee, the Nominations Committee, and several STFM groups. Currently he is a member of the Predoctoral Directors Development Institute Steering Committee.
The Healer’s Art Course is recognized with the 2008 Innovative Program Award for exploring areas in medicine that are seldom taught in medical school but are essential to the development and education of future compassionate and relationship-centered physicians. These areas include wholeness and healing, grief and loss, awe and mystery, and the care of the soul and service.The elective course for medical students focused on creating a community of inquiry into the basic experiences, values, and intentions of professionalism. Accepting the award was Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, (center) who first developed the course at the University of California, San Francisco in 1992 and has trained faculty to offer it at 59 medical schools in the United States and internationally. John Rogers, MD, MPH, MEd, STFM immediate past president (left) and Elizabeth Naumburg, MD, STFM Communications Committee chair (right), are pictured here with Dr Remen.
Allen Hixon, MD, received this year’s
STFM Advocate Award for his leadership in working with state legislators to increase the size of his family medicine residency and to fund it at the level of $4 million. Facing the impeding closure of Hawaii’s only civilian family medicine program, Dr Hixon worked with colleagues to develop an innovative statewide system of rural family medicine training. He shared this vision with policy makers, drafted legislation, and worked closely with them to see a $4 million appropriation make it through the state legislature. This new system of training does a better job of placing residents where there is a greater shortage of doctors and has doubled the number of family medicine residents in training while programs across the country are downsizing. This bill was enacted into law in July 2007 and has sparked interest in rural health workforce development in Hawaii. Dr Hixon is a board-certified family physician and the vice chair of the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Hawaii. He is currently the president of the Hawaii Academy of Family Physicians and a member of the AAFP Commission on Education. As the STFM nominee, Dr Hixon completed the US Department of Health and Human Services Primary Care Health Policy Fellowship. His research interests include health disparities and health workforce development. He is pictured here with individuals he credits as aids in his advocacy success: Perry Pugno, MD, (left), and Robert Cushman, MD, (right).
Dan Merenstein, MD, (right) receives the Best Research Paper Award from James Gill, MD, MPH, STFM Research Committee chair. The paper, “The Trail of Infant Response to Diphenhydramine. The TIRED Study—A Randomized, Controlled, Patient-oriented Trial,” was published in the Archives of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine (Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med 2006; 707-12). This award
recognizes the best research paper by an STFM member published in a
peer-reviewed journal between July 1, 2006 and June 30, 2007. Selection
is made by the STFM Research Committee and is based on the quality of
the research and its potential impact. Additional authors of the paper
include Marie Diener-West, PhD; Ann Halbower, MD; Alex Krist, MD; Haya Rubin, MD, PhD.
The Curtis Hames Research Award was presented to Howard Rabinowitz, MD, (right) by James Gill, MD, MPH, (left) STFM research committee chair. This award acknowledges and honors
individuals whose careers exemplify dedication to research in family
medicine. For 32 years, Dr Rabinowitz has served as director of Jefferson's Physician Shortage Area Program, a special admissions and educational program that has been successful in increasing the supply and retention of family physicians in rural areas. He has served as past president of the American Board of Family Medicine, a member of the National Advisory Committee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Generalist Physician Initiative, a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow, and project director of HRSA's $8 million UME-21 project. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine.
STFM Foundation Award Winners
Alfred Berg, MD, MPH (left), pictured here with Macaran Baird, MD, MS,
STFM Foundation President, was presented the F. Marian Bishop Award by
the STFM Foundation. This award honors individuals who have
significantly enhanced the academic credibility of family medicine by a
sustained long-term commitment to family medicine in academic settings. Dr Berg has been one of the true luminaries for family medicine in the research area. His area of expertise is clinical epidemiology in primary care settings. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and chairs its Committee on the Treatment of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. He has chaired the US Preventive Service Task Force.
International Scholar
Agustina Pinero, MD,University of Córdoba Medical School
New Faculty Scholars
Corey Lyon, DO, Research Family Medicine Residency Program, Kansas City, Mo; Rolf Montaivo-Chen, MD, University of Texas, Houston; Micheal Park, MD, University of Colorado Family Medicine Residency, Denver, Colo; Mari Ricker, MD, Providence Milwaukie Hospital Family Medicine Residency Program, Portland, Ore; Joseph Gibes, MD, Northwestern McGaw Family Medicine Residency, Glenview, Ill; Michelle Roett, MD, MPH, Georgetown University Providence Hospital Family Medicine Residency Program, Laurel, Md
Faculty Enhancement Awards
Alice Fornari, EdD, RD, Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Tina Kenyon, ACSW, NH Dartmouth Family Medicine Residency, Concord, NH
Bishop Fellows
Joseph Hobbs, MD, Medical College of Georgia; William Hueston, MD, Medical University of South Carolina; Jeff Susman, MD, University of Cincinnati
The STFM Board of Directors met April 30 and May 4 in Baltimore and took the following actions:
• Endorsed for distribution to STFM members an online CME program created by Boston University.
• Approved renewal of the Predoctoral Directors Development Institute for 2009 and 2010.
• Endorsed the principles outlined in a Partnership for Primary Care Workforce document.• Approved a document outlining job descriptions and expectations for STFM Board members.
• Agreed to take to the membership in 2009 a bylaws change allowing committee chairs the right to vote at Board meetings.
• Approved the general approaches outlined in a Preceptor Education Project 3 concept paper. Next steps will be for the project team to develop a detailed proposal for the STFM Board with specifics on objectives and implementation costs.
• Approved Past President Alan David, MD, as a member of the STFM Nominations Committee.
• Approved Board Member-at-Large Deborah Witt, MD, as a member of the Executive Committee.
• Approved a recommendation from the Research Committee to waive up to three Annual Spring Conference registration fees for AAFP Resident Research Scholars.
• Created a workgroup to bring proposal to the Board as to ideas for funding FMDRL
• Approved a list of guiding principles for assessing STFM conferences.
• Approved three new Foundation Trustees: Betsy Garrett, MD, MSPH; Jeannette South-Paul, MD; and Carlos Moreno, MD, MSPH
• Approved the appointment of Jerry Kruse, MD, MSPH, as Legislative Affairs chair and the reappointment of Sim Galazka, MD, and Betsy Naumburg, MD, as chairs of the Membership and Communications committees, respectively.
• Approved the following new and reappointed members on committees:
• Communications: New Appointments—Chris Anne Arthur, PhD, MPH, CHES; Kate Neely, MD; John Waits, MD; Reappointed members—Richard Neill, MD; Paul Gordon, MD, MPH• Legislative Affairs: New Appointments—John Delzell, MD, MSPH; Reappointed members—English Gonzales, MD; Dan Lasser, MD, MPH; Mike Maharry, MD; Osman Sanyer, MD; and Rick Streiffer, MD
• Membership: New Appointments—Tom Greer, MD, MPH
• Agreed to the following actions and statement following an analysis of the STFM Conference on Families and Health and the Behavioral Science Forum, considering financial viability and indirect costs.
• The content of family and behavioral medicine is core to the future of family medicine. The STFM Board of Directors charges the STFM Group on the Family and the Group on Behavioral Science with defining a new direction to advance family systems and behavioral science in the discipline and in the Society. This new direction may include a focus on collaborative care. The Board requests a one–two page concept paper from these two groups for discussion at the August 2008 Board meeting.
Some new methods that could be considered, among others, include:
• A content track in current meetings
• A new meeting focused on this new direction
• Collaboration with other organizations• Other decisions related to this analysis include:
• A decision not to renew an agreement with the Medical College of Wisconsin to cosponsor the Behavioral Science Forum beyond the 2008 meeting. STFM staff will be working with the Forum leadership to assist in a smooth transition.
• A decision that 2009 will be the last STFM Conference on Families and Health as it currently exists.
2008 Presenters—Be Sure to Upload Your Valuable Presentation Materials to FMDRL
To make presenter handout materials more readily available to all conference attendees, as well as other STFM members who were not able to attend the conference, we encourage all lead presenters to upload their presentation materials to STFM's Family Medicine Digital Resources Library (FMDRL) at www.fmdrl.org.
FMDRL, provided by STFM, provides peer-reviewed educational materials, works-in-progress, and conference materials to anyone searching by topic and/or author on the Web. FMDRL is intended to support and enhance the sharing and collaborative development of educational resources among family medicine educators for all levels of family medicine education.
Conference presenters and attendees are encouraged to visit FMDRL at www.fmdrl.org. Simply select the upload button to place your presentation materials online or the browse button to search for materials, then follow the easy, online instructions. If you are considering publishing your work in a peer-reviewed journal, we strongly suggest that you check the author's instructions for the journal you are considering submitting to and review their pre-publishing policies.
If you have any questions, or need assistance, contact tnolte at tnolte@stfm.org.
We Want to Hear From You! Online Overall Conference Evaluation
STFM continues to provide services online as a convenience to our members—we hope you'll find this evaluation process easy, convenient, and user-friendly. Your evaluation feedback for the Annual Spring Conference continues to play an integral part in future programming by STFM staff and the Program and Research Committees. Please take 3 minutes to visit the STFM Web site and give us your feedback: www.stfm.org/evaluation.htm.
Competency-based Curriculum Workgroup of the STFM Special Task Force on the Future of Family Medicine: Evidence-Based Medicine Workgroup
The working group on evidence-based medicine enthusiastically embraced the concept of developing an ideal curriculum for the STFM Future of Family Medicine project when Dr. Jeff Susman approached us at the meeting in 2006. Clearly we all agreed that evidence-based practice is critical to providing effective and efficient care in the 21st Century. Development of an “ideal EBP curriculum” has been on the agenda of the Working Group on EBM since we presented the theme day “Teaching Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) to Residents” at the annual meeting in 2003. An exhaustive competencies document, “Global Competencies for Information Management: Information Mastery and Information Technology” (available on FMDRL under the EBM Working Group) was created by a working group in 2001-2002, and we planned to move forward from this. We established a CBC Work Group on EBM and created an outline for the FFM-EBM Core-Curriculum in February 2007. This was reviewed by the Group on EBM at the Annual meeting in Chicago (April 2007) along with a sample unit on “Asking an Answerable Question. Click here to review the outline.
The next step is to solicit authors for each of the nine units defined (or more if needed) in the outline to create the framework as described below in the “Guidelines for Development of a Unit of Instruction.” Simultaneously we are working to collect good examples of curricula for each of the units. Due to changeover in leadership both in the Group on Evidence-based Medicine and the FFM-EBM Core Curriculum Group, we lost forward momentum during the 2007-2008 year, but we are re-energized to get this project finished NOW. We are looking for anyone who might be willing to develop a unit (it only took me a couple of hours to do the one I did), or who have curricular materials that they would be willing to share. We will also need to define competencies for learners at the various levels of medical education—undergraduate/medical student, graduate/resident, post-graduate/practicing physician, and maybe master/faculty and fellows. The current competencies document is arranged by learner level, and we will be incorporating previous feedback from others to update and condense the original document. This document will be available for authors to use as a basis for creating the units mentioned in the outline above.
Please contact Jennifer Hoock, MD, at jhoock@u.washington.edu or John Epling, MD, MSEd, at eplingj@upstate.edu if you are interested in joining us to work on this important project.
Submit Now—2009 Predoctoral Education Conference Call for Papers
Submission Deadline is June 16
The 35th Annual Predoctoral Education Conference will be held January 22–25, 2009, in Savannah, Ga. The conference theme is “Celebrating Our Strengths: Masters of Complexity and Continuity.” Submission deadline for this conference is June 16, 2008. For more information or to enter a submission, click here.
Baltimore Site of STFM 2008 Northeast Region Meeting
The Northeast Region Meeting will be held October 30–November 2, 2008, at the Baltimore Convention Center. The theme of this year’s meeting is “The New Deal in Health Care: A Medical Home for All.”
For more information, go to www.fmec.net or contact Larry Bauer at Laurence.bauer@sbcglobal.net.
Send Your Incoming IMGs to the 2008 Entering Resident Academy in Chicago
Developed
for international medical graduates (IMGs) who have recently matched
with a family medicine residency program, this workshop orients
participants to the principles of family medicine and other critical
communications skills. The program is intended to help participants
make a smooth and successful transition from medical school into a
family medicine residency program.
For more information or to register online, go to www.stfm.org/img/index.htm.
Learn to Perform Valuable Procedures With NPI in Las Vegas This June
When the National Procedures Institute (NPI) comes to the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, Nev June 14–17, take advantage of premium procedural education for yourself and your students. At NPI procedures courses, you can experience hands-on training for a variety of office procedures, including allergy evaluation and testing, hospitalist procedures, laser aesthetics, stress ECG testing, and aesthetic procedures—all of which are of increasing interest to young family physicians.
Building on a partnership of family medicine organizations, American Academy of Family Physicians, Texas Academy of Family Physicians, and the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine purchased NPI on January 1, 2008, to provide members valuable practice enhancement techniques. For the past 18 years, NPI has helped more than 45,000 primary care physicians provide quality, cost-effective patient care while broadening the range of services they offer and enhancing their practice revenue. NPI offers more than 100 CME medical seminars annually in cities across the country, covering a full range of office, hospital, and emergency room procedures.
View the 2008 event schedule and register for upcoming CME conferences on the NPI Web site, www.NPInstitute.com.
Dates and Location: June 14–17, 2008—Flamingo Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada
June 14—Allergy Evaluation and Testing
June 14–15—Hospitalist Procedures
June 14–15—Laser Aesthetics
June 14–15—Stress ECG Testing
June 16–17—Aesthetic Procedures
Do You Have an Open Position to Fill?
STFM’s Fall 2008 Positions and Opportunities (P&O) Book will be distributed via e-mail on September 10, 2008, to all STFM members and Annual Spring Conference non-member registrants. Don’t miss this chance to let family medicine’s key faculty know about your position openings. Thousands of recipients will be able to immediately view and respond to your showcased opportunity from the comfort of their own chair! Click Here to see advertising rates and deadlines.
STFM 2007–2008 Annual Report Now Online
This year’s Annual Report is now available on the STFM Web site at www.stfm.org/annualreport/index.htm. The Annual Report contains reports from the STFM Board, Foundation, standing committees, and all STFM groups. This year’s report also features a “Photo Yearbook” with pictures of conferences and various events throughout the past calendar year. There are also links to and from appropriate areas within the STFM Web site. Be sure to view this report to check out the activities of the Society over the past year.
New Members—
| Arkansas Shane Speights, MD |
Missouri Karl Kochendorfer, MD |
| Colorado Jennifer Roller, MD |
New York Santhosh Paulus, MD |
| Florida Gerry Velde, MD |
North Carolina Sandra McCrystle, BSN, MSN Sue Miller, PharmD Susan Slatkoff, MD Tom Wroth, MD, MPH |
| Georgia Jerry Daniel, PhD, JD, MPH Maria McKnight, DO |
Oregon Tanya Page, MD |
| Idaho Trudy Bearden |
Wisconsin David Nelson, PhD Alan Wells |
| Massachusetts Arthur Brewer |
Canada Lisa McCarthy, PharmD |
The STFM Foundation Board of Trustees met on Friday, May 2, at the Annual Spring Conference in Baltimore. Foundation officers and Trustees for 2008–2009 are:
Officers:
Macaran Baird, MD, MS, President
Peter Coggan, MD, MSEd, Vice President
Elizabeth Burns, MD, MA, Treasurer
Heidi Chumley, MD, Secretary
Stacy Brungardt, CAE, Executive Director
Trustees:
Carlos Moreno, MD, MSPH
Elizabeth Garrett, MD, MSPH
William Phillips, MD, MPH
John Rogers, MD, MPH, MEd
Joseph Scherger, MD, MPH
Jeannette South-Paul, MD
Annual Giving Campaign
The tremendous success of the 2007 campaign, which exceeded $100,000, prompted the Trustees to approve a goal of $110,000 for 2008. A campaign committee led by Peter Coggan, MD, MSEd will contact many STFM members personally, delivering the message of Foundation responsiveness to STFM members and service to STFM.
Campaign contributions will continue to support leadership development programs. A subcommittee has been charged with evaluating and revising the Faculty Enhancement Award to provide a greater in-depth experience, perhaps of longer duration and including a mentorship component. It is anticipated that support for the new Group Project Fund will at a minimum maintain its current funding level of $30,000.
Acknowledgment
During the STFM Annual Spring Conference, members of the Presidents Club (contributions of $1,000 or more) were recognized at the Foundation reception and given specially designed pewter paperweights. A breakfast honored both Presidents Club and Trustees Club ($500–$999) members.AAFP Global Health Workshop Accepting Submissions
Would you like to share your international family medicine
knowledge and experience? Consider submitting an abstract for posters or
peer presentations at the 5th Family Medicine Global Health Workshop, “Connecting Universal Family Medicine Concepts With Local Needs.” The workshop will be held September 4–6 at the Omni Interlocken Resort in Denver (Broomfield), Colorado.Submissions will be accepted through June 2. For further information, please go to www.aafp.org/intl/workshop08 or
contact Rebecca Janssen at rjanssen@aafp.org, or Alex Ivanov at
aivanov@aafp.org
AAFP Home Study Program Is Soliciting Proposals
The AAFP's Home Study Program is soliciting proposals for manuscripts for FP Essentials, the program's monthly, peer-reviewed monograph series. The topics for which proposals are being solicited are:
• Gastrointestinal Conditions in Children
• Hypertension
• Male Genitourinary Conditions
• Seizure Disorders
An honorarium is provided to FP Essentials monograph authors. More information is available at www.aafp.org/homestudy/fpessentials/authorinstructions.