I wanted to do family medicine. I knew I wanted to have the kind of connection he did with his patients, not just when he was sick, but when he was well. I wanted to see them outside the hospital. I wanted them to understand that he had the ability to help on a level, but I knew I didn’t want to do that in a suburban setting like that, so early on I wanted to differentiate myself from my father. As a result, my career has focused on the medical field. From remedial medicine to federally accredited health centers, VAs are committed to value-based primary care practices focused on marginalized and minority communities, and now the Medicaid population.
For me, family medicine has been the best way to serve marginalized communities. It was the result of efforts to
You’ve been involved in touring for a little over ten years now. What is your greatest achievement so far?
I tried to collect data. It’s not vertical. We know about the impact and success of the program in the immediate time frame of connecting with our students, but we look forward to having partners in the future to collect data and connect with these students long-term.
Anecdotally, the success of the tour for me was the number of students participating in the program and speaking about its impact on them, whether it was at the SNMA conference or applying to be a mentor on the tour. They talked about their perspectives and their careers, and when they met us in the Hamptons or South Carolina how the motivation they received during our programming actually set them on the path they wanted to finish. Talk about how you did it. I think that’s a success.
We have genuinely sought to make an impact by guiding them through day-to-day programming. we recognize We recognize that, but our goal is really to get them to take that first step. Or there are many students I keep in touch with at conferences and other conferences to celebrate our efforts. So for me it’s an extreme success.
Where do you see opportunities to progress on tour?
We’ve made progress in programming over the years, and I think we can continue to move in that direction. We now have a high school curriculum that we want to run just as often, if not more often, in terms of reaching star students early in their journey for the very reasons we talked about. I’m here.
During the last few years of pandemics, we have expanded our program to medical students. We believe, based on our experience, that while they’re already on that path, it’s an equally difficult time, so it’s providing them with a lot of motivation to keep going through medical school. We need them to stay that way.
Through a program launched in partnership with SNMA and the Association of Latino Medical Students, each summer doctors and students from across the country are paired for mock interviews and the potential to form mentoring relationships. It has been very successful and the Academy will definitely be a partner as we continue that program over the next few years. We are having discussions with the AAFP about how we can offer that to members of our academy as a way to connect with students across the country through mentoring. Rather than being hands-on and time-consuming, it is perhaps an opportunity to connect with diverse students from around the world. This is a successful model that we have deployed at another academy, and we plan to repeat the same with our family doctors in the near future.
We see our advancement opportunities as expanding our audience and the different ways they connect and think about their individual specialties such as family medicine. Our program has been very successful. These students who are currently in school should be able to benefit as well.
What challenges do tours face?
For grassroots initiatives and nonprofits, I think it’s important to have succession planning and to ensure that we can all continue to have strong partners like AAFP and SNMA as we continue to evolve. As well as designing further progress so that we can find additional leaders to help us continue this program to more states. That’s one of the areas I’m working on right now. I’m thinking about how we can sustain this program, not only as something that we personally work on, but also in terms of how we institutionalize it.
These are lively conversations and I’d love to keep moving forward. But I don’t really see any challenges when it comes to what we think of as bread and butter: programming. Over the past few years, during the pandemic, so many students have attended our virtual program. We continue to reach our goals with our messages. We continue to be as prominent as possible on social media. You can see us on Instagram. It definitely needs to spread on TikTok. We’re not there yet, but more will come. The more you can reach more students with your own programming, webinar topics, etc., I think there’s nothing wrong with reaching students who know they need to get into medicine.
What final thoughts would you like to share?
Because of this generation, I am excited about the future of family medicine and health care in general. I strongly recommend that you give serious thought to