This erosion did not happen overnight, and recovery will not either. The recent RAND report is a helpful validation in our cause to strengthen the future of emergency physicians and emergency systems of care across the United States.

During my more than 20 years in ACEP leadership, including serving as Secretary-Treasurer, Vice-President of Communications, and Chair of the Board of Directors, I have come to believe that this challenge is our call to action. We must collectively rebuild the recognition that we are proven leaders in crisis and stewards of safety. Although we may embody the last line of defense in championing patient care, we are so much more. We are the frontline of diagnostic excellence and efficiency, delivered with humanity in a complicated, often unraveling health care system.

To secure a better future for emergency medicine, we need to restore the respect, investment, and opportunities our profession deserves, not for personal gain primarily, but for the future of the specialty we love, and for the patients who rely on us. Great missions are never individual; they are collective. Let us build that future, our future, together.

Gabor D. Kelen, MD, FACEP

Current Professional Positions: Chair, Department of Emergency Medicine, Johns Hopkins Medicine; Emergency Physician-in-Chief, Johns Hopkins Health System; Director, CEPAR, Johns Hopkins Institutions; Professor, Johns Hopkins University and Bloomberg School of Public Health

Internships and Residency: Emergency Medicine Residency, Johns Hopkins Hospital (1984)

Medical Degree: MD, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada (1979)

Response: “He advocated for me and my patients, fiercely championed the dignity and heroism of emergency medicine, and forged an essential new direction for the specialty.”

Standing on the shoulders of giants who founded the field, and following their example, I aspire to inspire the emergency medicine community to usher in a new era of emergency medicine—one that elevates the standing of emergency medicine to its rightful and respected place in the house of medicine by advancing a unifying and transformative vision of the specialty. We will work together to envision this new paradigm that empowers emergency physicians to shape the specialty’s future and unite an ever-fracturing discipline around a renewed sense of high common calling. This will promote professional dignity for individual emergency physicians, and fulfillment across expansive career pathways within a reimagined landscape of emergency medicine.

The fundamental nature of emergency medicine must evolve to overcome current malaise and pervasive disaffection. Our current model has led to extensive and persistent burnout, early retirement, and disillusionment with the field, sufficient to give medical students pause. Incremental advances, as important as they have been, have been matched with equal setbacks, and cannot by themselves overcome the fundamental structural difficulties that hinder the specialty and impede fulfilling long-term careers.