An Interview with your new President
Shannon Connolly, MD
Q: Why family medicine for you? Who were the role models who inspired you to go into family medicine? I took a very circuitous route to becoming a family doctor. After college I worked as a medical assistant and later a clinic supervisor in an abortion clinic that had been the site of a shooting where several people had been injured and killed, years before I arrived. Many of my coworkers had survived that event and continued to work in that clinic because they believed so strongly in reproductive justice and the importance of the work that they did. I was very inspired by the commitment that they had to the community. Over time, one of the family doctors there became a mentor and encouraged me to go to medical school because he could see that I loved working with patients as much as I loved the science of medicine. At the time it seemed like a crazy idea because I thought I had already found my career. Nonetheless, he convinced me to take the plunge and go back to school. As a second-year med student, I was fairly sure that I would go into family medicine because it seemed to be a field that was grounded in social justice. I wanted to be the kind of doctor that thought not only about how to fix people who were sick, but also about why people got sick and what role our society played in creating those conditions. I also loved sexual and reproductive health care and thought that family medicine would allow me to combine all these interests. I planned to do a rotation with a family doctor named George Tiller who had a family planning clinic in Kansas, so I could see what that might look like in practice. However, that rotation never came to pass. Shortly before I was going to start, Dr Tiller was murdered by an antiabortion extremist while he attended church. I was devastated. I think that that event tipped me into family medicine because I wanted to honor Dr Tiller by following his example.
Q: What piqued your interest in becoming active with your county and state AFP chapters? When I was a med student, one of my faculty members invited me along to go to what was then called the National Conference of Special Constituencies (NCSC), now called the National Conference of Constituency Leaders (NCCL) at the AAFP. I was just a med student and, on that trip, I met some family medicine “greats” —Jay Lee, Michelle Quiogue, Shelly Rodrigues, and Susan Hogeland. They were so warm and welcoming and encouraging that I just knew I had found “my people.” From there, I went to every CAFP event I could. 22
California Family Physician Summer 2021
Q: Is now the best time ever to be a family physician, in your estimation? Now is both the best and most important time to be a family physician! We have so much good work to do, and I believe right now we are in a moment in time where change is more possible than it ever has been before. The pandemic has incontrovertibly changed the way our society thinks about medicine and public health. The Black Lives Matter movement has the kind of momentum we have not seen since the Civil Rights era. The house of medicine is examining how it has reified historical injustices and people are finally paying attention. It is the perfect constellation of events. We must seize this opportunity and use it for the good of our patients. I cannot imagine a more important or rewarding job right now than that of the family physician.
Q: What are the most important challenges confronting CAFP? Well, we have a few! As an organization that exists to support family doctors and their patients, our challenges are the challenges of our members. We have a perversely incentivized health care system where doctors are undervalued and frequently treated as interchangeable commodities, rather than
