ACEP has not increased its national dues for nearly 10 years. So if you take into account that inflation has increased by maybe nearly 25 to 30 percent, if you’ve seen that inflation increased eight percent last year, and you want us to continue to advocate for you at the state level, the federal level, our clinical policies, our representations and liaisons with other organizations, we believe that we needed to raise the dues here to continue to fund those avenues, those projects, and those opportunities to better serve the individual physicians and their practices and their careers.

To emergency physicians who are not currently members of ACEP, what’s your pitch to them as to why they should become ACEP members?

Dr. Kang: I would encourage every emergency physician to get more involved. I hope ACEP is the one that earns the trust and provides and shows its value. When we talk about why you should join ACEP, I think some of it is for what people acknowledge, but may not necessarily give due credit to, the clinical policies that help you fight to better take care of your patients. The clinical policies that aren’t adopted because of advocacy—such as the one-hour sepsis bundle. When we talk about how you can improve your workplace, not only the ability to have food and drink at work, but also security, or making sure that you are respected and can find additional resources, whether it’s EMRs, scribes, practices that will help improve how you can deliver quality care to your patients.

Legislatively, who else can advocate on your behalf to make sure that you are respected and that you are the leader of the emergency care team? Every single emergency physician sees that whether it’s because of our efforts with the RUC and the AMA, whether it’s making sure that the battles of the scope of practice are being fought to better safeguard your role as the leaders of the health care team and the successes we’ve seen in multiple states thanks to our members at the chapter level, whether it’s in your institution, whether it’s training in the workforce …ACEP does many, many things. I hope people will take a step back and say, if ACEP wasn’t doing what it was doing, where would you be and where would your practice be now? And I hope that somewhere along the way, they will see that what they get back is multiples of those dues.