Each year, the ACEP President sits down with ACEP Now’s Medical Editor in Chief to discuss issues of interest to members. This second interview, conducted toward the conclusion of Dr. Aisha Terry’s tenure as President, reviews her goal of strengthening the leadership pipeline for the College and follows up on challenges that arose during the past 12 months. This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

DR. DARK: Thanks Dr. Terry for joining us. When we last spoke and we had a good conversation near the beginning of your presidency, now we‘re kind of closing in on the home stretch. One of the things you wanted to accomplish was talking about the leadership pipeline for ACEP. What do you think you‘ve been able to accomplish during your term so far?

DR. TERRY: Well, first of all, thank you so much Dr. Dark. I appreciate the opportunity to share again and certainly a lot has happened since we last spoke. But in terms of the leadership pipeline efforts, we’ve definitely made some progress. As I mentioned before, my original plan was to first take a look at the landscape in terms of what leadership opportunities are out there currently, particularly relative to recruitment and succession planning. Those have been the key couple of areas that I’ve looked at in terms of leadership pipeline as well as highlighting those leaders in emergency medicine who are really outstanding examples of how to lead outside of the traditional kind of brick and mortar of practicing clinical medicine in the emergency department.

We’ve engaged the AAMC in terms of partnering when it comes to recruiting for our great specialty. We find ourselves needing to get back to the basics, of talking about why emergency medicine is an amazing specialty and why we are heroes, not just during COVID, not just during the pandemic, but in the job that we do in serving the health care safety net. We are taking that story on the road and sharing that particularly with medical students. We will be speaking at the AAMC again at their annual meeting in November. Again, just sharing the good word about what emergency physicians do and how we absolutely are looking for the cream of the crop when it comes to future generations of emergency physicians.

On the succession planning side of things, I am really focused on making sure that internally when it comes to ACEP operations and leadership operations, that there is a plan for the future.