Dear AAEM Members,
For all religions and cultures, the holidays and rituals surrounding the Winter Solstice celebrate hope. As we emerge from the Longest Night in the Northern Hemisphere, we look to the lengthening of days. While the season does not offer to grant every emergency physician’s wish of more hour in a day, the season focuses us on joy, love, peace and appreciation of the grace that brings light at the end of darkness.
Emergency Medicine, like all hospital based specialties, is in the midst of our Longest Night. As private equity has begun to encroach on the sacred relationship between physician and patient, striving to put profits ahead of patient safety and patient well-being, we see the darkness of longer wait times in the ED, dangerously long periods of boarding, inadequate nursing and physician staff to meet the needs of patients for medical care, inadequate supplies of PPE and procedural equipment, insufficient number of available follow up appointments, increasing patient dissatisfaction, nurse and physician burnout, medical staff leaving the field in ever increasing numbers, moral injury, depression and suicide. THIS IS THE DIRECT RESULT OF THE CORPORATE PRACTICE OF MEDICINE. AND AAEM HAS THE SOLUTION: PHYSICIAN LED MEDICAL CARE.
We are truly putting our money where our mouth is and has always been. We have filed a lawsuit against Envision, protesting the corporate practice of medicine in the State of California. This is a sentinel case, which has the potential to reverberate to every State in the nation, returning medical care to where it needs to be: in the hands of board certified physicians who put patient over profit and hold sacred our responsibility to do the best thing for every patient every time. Our risk is financially great, but our commitment to you and your patients is greater.
At this Holiday Season, know that AAEM stands with you as the Champion of the Emergency Physician and of the Emergency Patient. Know that we see the light at the end of the darkness and that we are firmly committed to fighting for the end of this Longest Night and bringing medicine back to the sacred relationship between physician and patient. More than anything else, I am grateful to you for your support of AAEM and I am humbled to be President of the only organization that is actively fighting, putting it all on the line, to protect our vocation and our patients — those who depend on us when they have no one else to help them and nowhere else to go. For all you do every day of your life, I thank you. I promise you that AAEM will stand solidly with you championing your right to do what you do best in an environment of workplace fairness and respect. Please stand with us. Renew your membership, stay involved, and together we can end the dark night and move toward a better practice environment for ourselves and our patients.
This Holiday Season, I wish you joy, peace, love, abundance, and control of your practice. I thank you for loving your patients and caring for them when they need you most. We see you. We appreciate you. We stand with you.
In deepest gratitude,
Dr. Lisa Moreno