Each year, ACEP’s Council elects new leaders for the College at its meeting. The Council, which represents all 53 chapters, 40 sections of membership, the Association of Academic Chairs of Emergency Medicine, the Council of Emergency Medicine Residency Directors, the Emergency Medicine Residents’ Association, and the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, will elect the College’s President-Elect and four members to the ACEP Board of Directors when it meets in late September. Let’s meet the candidates.

President-Elect

The President-Elect candidate—running unopposed—responded to this prompt:

What do you believe is the single most divisive issue in emergency medicine at this time and how would you address it?

Aisha T. Terry, MD, MPH, FACEP

Current Professional Positions: associate professor, emergency medicine and health policy, and senior advisor, emergency medicine health policy fellowship, George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Washington, D.C.

Internships and Residency: emergency medicine residency, University of Maryland Medical System department of emergency medicine, Baltimore

Medical Degree: MD, University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill (2003); MPH, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health (2011)

Response

“The world is getting too small for both an Us and a Them. Us and Them have become co-dependent, intertwined, fixed to one another. We have no separate fates, but are bound together in one.” —Sam Killermann

Divisive issues—those that tend to foster disagreement and even hostility—create the illusion of there being an “us” and a “them.” This illusion creates a sense of competition wherein there must be a winner and a loser, allowing little to no space for listening and compromise. Time and time again, divisiveness has resulted in stress, anxiety, and damaged relationships. As we continue to weather the far-reaching impacts of the pandemic and find ourselves coping with unprecedented amounts of burnout, it is especially important that divisiveness be stamped out as it only further depletes our energy and hope for a brighter future.

Most acknowledge that divisiveness is a problem and would appreciate a path forward. In fact, the Public Agenda/USA Today Hidden Common Ground survey from Feb. 2021 found powerful consensus across political affiliations that our country needs to move beyond the destructive nature of political divisiveness. It also found that most think that there is more common ground amongst the public than is typically acknowledged, but that disagreements tend to be handled destructively rather than constructively.

Whether the issue is firearm violence or the role of private equity in health care, we know that our specialty will continue to grapple with really tough topics. Divisive issues are typically related to ethics and personal choice, which foster strong opinions as well as proposed solutions that tend to be polarized and inflexible. Rather than focus on the issue, we must determine how to minimize the destructive potential of the divisiveness. An issue does not in and of itself create division; rather, our approach and accompanying emotions involved with resolving the issue determine the degree of vitriol felt. In the words of Eckhart Tolle, “rather than being [our] thoughts and emotions, [we must] bethe awareness behind them.”