National Conference Q&A: Event Is
Springboard to Leadership

Douglas Henley, M.D., FAAFP, resident chair 1980: After I attended my first conference, I applied and was appointed as a student member of the Commission on Legislation and Governmental Affairs. I was both the student and then resident representative on that commission before I ran for resident chair. I also spent a year on the Residency Review Committee for Family Medicine. You met a plethora of leaders in the discipline who were positive about urging the residents and students who were at the commission Clusters, or at the conference itself, to demonstrate leadership skills that you needed and encouraged you to think about running for other positions.

I never thought about the Residency Review Committee for Family Medicine, but at the end of my resident year on the Commission on Legislation, a group of mentors came to me. For some reason they thought I would be a good person to have on the RRC. It was an incredible experience. The discipline at that time was having a conversation about whether to continue with operative surgery versus outpatient surgery in terms of curriculum change.

Marla Tobin, M.D., FAAFP, student chair 1980, resident chair 1982 and 1983: I think it was a natural step to run for chief resident in my residency after doing all this and to go on to the committees and commissions of the Academy as a student, resident, as well as a young physician. I was on the Women, Minority and New Physicians Committee. I was on the Membership Committee, couple of other commissions and committees. I went on to the Board of Directors at the Missouri AFP pretty quickly, including serving as president and chair of the Board. It was a great education in parliamentary procedure. I think that’s something you don’t learn in college or medical school. And to how to pack business meetings, get them done and stay on time and run these kind of conferences.

Now that National Conference is as big as it is, it’s a huge logistics lift, but even in those days it was a big logistics feat. You learned how to network, getting involved in medical politics. In those days, it was a good old boy network. It still is somewhat a good old boy network of medical politics, hospital privileging, medical staff rules and all of the local politics that you have to play as a family doc. You learn that pretty quickly in this role. And you get skills that you wouldn’t get in medical school or residency any other way. That’s huge.

Beulette Hooks, M.D., FAAFP, student chair 1993, Resident chair 1996: It taught me not only how to win elections but also how to lose. And going on after that because a lot of times people will quit, saying, “Well, they didn’t want me to do this, so I’m just going to stop and I’m not going to be involved at all.” After my first National Conference, I wanted to apply for the Committee on Minority Affairs. Well, I didn’t get chosen. But people kept pushing and saying, “Go to the next meeting. See what you’re interested in.” And then at the next conference I thought, “Maybe I’ll run for student delegate to the Congress.” All of these experiences prepare you for the real world. They prepare you for trying to help somebody get hospital privileges. It gave me an avenue to help others and also to continue to advocate for my patients, learning how to campaign, learning how to run for an office.

Daniel Lewis, M.D., FAAFP, resident chair 2006; current chair of the National Conference Planning Subcommittee: If you’ve met one family doctor, you’ve met one family doctor. The surgeons in my hospital are fairly similar, the general surgeons do about the same thing. None of the family physicians have the exact same approach to what they do. Some do pediatrics, some do obstetrics. Some folks do geriatrics. Some do sports medicine. Getting involved in the Academy gives you a broad opportunity to see individuals who focus their practice in so many different ways. It gives you an opportunity to learn what you may want to be. There are no borders on what we can do and no requirements to keep us from doing what we choose. Being involved gives you that opportunity to network and meet those individuals. We all are family physicians, but we apply our training in different ways and with different traits in service of our patients.

Julia Wang, M.D., student chair 2020: I’ve always viewed advocacy work as an antidote to burnout in medicine and frustration with our health care system. When I talk with medical students and residents, everyone is so deeply frustrated with the inequities that are inherently built into the way that health care is run in the U.S. Being involved with commissions and the AAFP peels that curtain back a little bit and helps you understand how things function. How do you get hospital policies changed? How do you move forward and start chipping away at the things that otherwise sit and gnaw at you? The earlier we can teach these skills to up-and-coming family medicine docs, the better off our specialty will be in the future.

Henley: I suspect all of us probably suffered a little bit of imposter syndrome when we first got involved with the Academy via National Conference. You know: Why me? It was through the encouragement of a lot of people who got us involved, encouraged us to continue to be involved and to think that we can do these things. You can run for resident chair. You can apply for a commission. Marla mentioned this earlier, and I think this is critical. All of us probably benefited greatly from the influence of our state chapter in terms of continuing to reel us in. Like Marla, I signed up as a member during first year of medical school, but I never went to a North Carolina Academy meeting or any other family physician meeting until after I went to National Conference. The North Carolina chapter had nothing to do with that. It was Ed Shahady, (former STFM and Florida AFP president) who was chair of the Family Medicine Department at that time (1976-1986) at Chapel Hill. The minute I came back from that summer meeting, I knew I wanted to go to the North Carolina Academy meeting that fall in Raleigh.

To me, it was a big meeting, but I was the only medical student there. You would have thought I was a rock star. I didn’t think I was a rock star, but I was a student interested in family medicine, and these folks surrounded me and said, “You’re one of us, and we want you to be a student and resident leader in this organization and get you involved.” I’m thinking, “Why me?” But they were so encouraging. Sue Makey (who later became the NCAFP CEO) had just started as a secretary at the NCAFP, but she and the chapter leadership were going to assure that you remained involved. So, it is just incredible how the chapters can be a big part of that mentorship and encouragement, as well.

Tobin: That’s why some of us went back and started the North Carolina residents organization under the chapter. Because they were so supportive and there were a lot of us getting involved from the programs. And they were really wanting to push the envelope and get a resident organization going, too.

Lewis: I do recall seeing the FMIG Program of Excellence Awards for the first time when I came out there. I wasn’t an officer in our FMIG, but I talked to our FMIG president and vice president, like, “Hey, we should apply for this.” OK, but we don’t know anything about it. I sat down and wrote that application over what I knew we had done, and it actually won our first Program of Excellence Award based on my application, so that did certainly get noticed in the state and at the medical school level. National Conference gives the students a leg up in a lot of ways, both in their own schools but also with residency programs.

Tobin: I think the students and residents who are involved do get noticed at their medical schools. In my residency at Duke, it got to be almost a wildfire. We had five or six of us involved in national politics. Our residency director was like, “We can’t have any more. We’ve got too many people leaving all the time.” We had to take turns doing some of that. But there are plenty of roles to do a lot of different things.

The thing that’s excited me about the conference since is the Emerging Leader Institute program and some of the new ways to get people to the conference, involved in the conference and showcased in the conference. I know for me, it led to not only a lot of state and local opportunities, but being able to speak in a lot of different venues in state and Academy meetings. 

^{Mercer University School of Medicine student Beulette Hooks speaks during a candidate forum during the 1992 National Conference in Kansas City, Mo. Hooks was elected student chair of the 1993 National Conference. She also served as resident chair of the event in 1996.}