PRESIDENT’S COMMENTS Amy H. Kaji, MD, PhD Harbor-UCLA Medical Center 2021–2022 President, SAEM
United in Facing the Major Issues That Face Us
“Innovation and scientific discovery truly arise and take form in an environment of inquiry where individuals can connect and network.”
22
After what seemed like a whirlwind of a year, this will be my final column in SAEM Pulse. Looking back on the accomplishments over the past year, SAEM has much to be proud of: we reached record membership numbers, launched a new website, hosted over 9,000+ attendees on live webinars, awarded close to $700,000 for the 2021-2022 cycle of research and education grants, announced new funding opportunities, and had record submissions for our journals. We also led our first ARMED MedEd cohort and are excited to be hosting our first eLEAD cohort. Over the past 12 months we've partnered with our sister emergency medicine (EM) organizations to issue more than a dozen joint statements which reflect our Society’s commitment to addressing issues at the forefront of our specialty. I encourage you to take the time to read through them. More than ever, our specialty is united in facing the major issues that face us. As Federal funds allocated for medical research continue to diminish, SAEM will continue to advocate for our specialty and think outside the box in terms of funding sources. In doing so, we will look to not just our sister EM organizations, but to other medical and surgical specialties where we have overlapping research interests. COVID-19 initially led to a stark decrease in emergency department (ED) visits, thereby seemingly decreasing the need for EM providers. While we welcomed 2,702 newly matched residents into the emergency medicine family in 2022, our specialty had 219 unfilled positions in the 2022 Match. Yet, outside of the deviation of 2021, the number of 2022 applicants appears in line with recent years. There were 81 more positions to fill in emergency medicine in 2022 than in 2021. This continues a pattern of significant and swift growth for the specialty – since 2018, emergency medicine has added 643 residency positions, an increase of 28.2 percent. Still, we will need to better understand all of the different factors that may be affecting applicant career decision-making.
We have now all largely returned to preCOVID visit numbers and are experiencing boarding and nurse staff shortages. COVID-19 highlighted the need to reconsider the scope of EM practice, as it is clearly moving beyond the physical space of the adult and pediatric ED and into paramedicine, telemedicine, urgent care, observation medicine, critical care, street medicine, etc. How we define our specialty is dynamic, and our workforce will need to be sized accordingly. In a nutshell: The future of our specialty is full of opportunities and remains bright. More specifically, the future of SAEM is bright. I will soon turn over the reins to Dr. Angela Mills, who is extraordinary in her abilities to effectively lead, collaborate, and achieve consensus to move forward toward our vision and carrying out SAEM’s mission. Dr. Mills has carefully shaped the objectives for the upcoming year for the SAEM committees and task forces and is committed to supporting SAEM academies and interest groups to be productive and innovative. We are drawing close to May 10, which marks the first day of the 2022 SAEM Annual Meeting in New Orleans! After living in the virtual meeting world for two long years of COVID 19 and its associated variants and surges, our members are ready to embrace one another in person. While we are grateful for the virtual platforms that allowed our society to support one another through the uncertainty of the management of the disease, being faceto-face uniquely facilitates knowledge transfer, intellectual discourse, and the strengthening personal connections. Replete with cuttingedge educational content, networking events, career development opportunities, experiential learning competitions, and other activities, SAEM22 will be extra special to all of us, and I look forward to seeing you there!
ABOUT DR. KAJI: Amy H. Kaji, MD, PhD is a professor of clinical emergency medicine and vice chair of academic affairs in the department of emergency medicine at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
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