SAN ANTONIO -- Three candidates for president-elect of the American Academy of Family Physicians offered glimpses of their values, leadership styles, and hopes for the future of the Academy, during speeches at the Congress of Delegates meeting here on Tuesday.
John Cullen, MD, chief of staff and director of emergency medical services at Providence Valdez Medical Center, in Valdez, Alaska, portrayed himself as a small-town physician -- the kind who, when called to weigh-in the local wrestling team, realized he'd delivered every boy on the team.
Having lost a partner and mentor to suicide, physician burnout is one of his major priorities.
"We must help our members be resilient in the face of our dysfunctional system. But more than that we must have the vendors, the employers, the payers value our members and become our allies," he said.
Cullen has served on the Alaska State Medical Board and on the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services' (CMS) National Advisory Committee on Rural Health, and is a past president of the Alaska Academy of Family Physicians.
Asked for his perspective on single payer healthcare, Cullen was supportive but cautious, saying the AAFP should take steps to "try to move in that direction" and be prepared with a plan if single payer gains traction in Washington.
Another candidate described herself as both a dreamer and a doer.
"I was born focused," said Lynne Lillie, MD, a member of the Mayo Clinic Department of Family Medicine in Rochester, Minn.
She recalled that, unbeknownst to her parents, she drove herself to colleges campuses, asked for interviews, and applied for early admission.
But caring for patients has, for family physicians, given way to administrative and regulatory burdens: prior authorization, coding, and documentation for complex quality reporting systems, she said.
As president-elect, Lillie would curb these burdens on physicians, ensure that family physicans are given equal treatment to specialists, and seek to "restore joy in family medicine."
The third candidate, Mott Blair, MD, a regional medical director at Vidant Family Medicine in Greenville, N.C., also promised to address the administrative burden. He also listed adequate payment for family medicine and promoting healthcare for all as priorities, if elected.
He spoke of bringing joy back to family medicine and the AAFP, and asserted that the future of medicine doesn't belong to "partialists" -- that is, specialists.
"We believe that the future lies in the continuous, comprehensive, coordinated, patient-centered care that only family physicians provide," he said.
The election takes place Wednesday morning.