Twice a year, the Medical Editor in Chief of ACEP Now sits down with the ACEP President to discuss issues relevant to the College and issues important to emergency physicians. I solicited several of these questions from online emergency-physicians’ forums in order to bring the voice of our colleagues directly to the leadership of the College. The accompanying article is an excerpt of the conversation I had with Dr. Aisha Terry.

Dr. Dark: There are a few big topics that I want to get into today. One is going to be about leadership and mentorship. One is going to be about ownership in emergency medicine. And then of course we’re going to circle back around to the boarding crisis. But first, let’s start with leadership and mentorship within ACEP. It’s one of the things that you wish to focus on during your presidency. What are your plans for ACEP’s leadership pipeline?

Dr. Terry: It’s certainly near and dear to my heart in terms of, not just leadership, but the leadership pipeline. Leadership is about supply and demand. There’s never enough of a supply of leaders for the demand. We’re seeing in emergency medicine now more than ever that indeed there is a demand for more leaders. We are facing unprecedented crises in various ways, and we need people on the ground taking care of patients, but also being leaders outside of the clinical setting. My goal for this year, keeping in mind everything that we’re facing in terms of workforce challenges, is to really focus on upstream efforts for pipeline enhancement. The leadership pipeline is about seeking out, recruiting, preparing, and retaining leaders,

It’s important to start upstream, meaning we have to start with our medical students and residents. One of the things that I hope to do this year is develop a leadership-pipeline portfolio for the College. And the way that I plan to go about this is first and foremost taking our story on the road. One of the things that I think we don’t do enough of as emergency physicians is talk about ourselves and how amazing our specialty is in terms of what we do for patients every day. We need to take that story on the road to make sure that our future emergency physicians and medical students are aware of what an amazing specialty emergency medicine is, how we are the quintessential specialty when it comes to health equity, when it comes to the safety net of health care in this country.