July 2000 • Volume 6 • Number 7
Share views online during 'Keystone III'
Specialty will assess itself, brainstorm possibilitiesBY JANE STOEVER
The specialty's leaders are convening a think tank, "Keystone III," to take stock of the present and grapple with the future.
They want your views, too. You can read papers for the Oct. 4-8 meeting on the days they're presented and respond online.
The meeting at the Cheyenne Mountain Conference Resort outside Colorado Springs, Colo., follows in the footsteps of Keystone I and II, held in 1984 and 1988 at Keystone, Colo. Gayle Stephens, M.D., of Birmingham, Ala., created the early Keystones as times of meditation in the mountains, times for family physicians to stimulate each other's thinking, provoke each other, inspire each other.
Keystone III, at the meeting and online, will ask:
- Is where we are where we were going?
- What is the domain of family practice (scope, role and function)?
- How should family physicians care for patients in the context of family and community?
- How does a changing country change family practice?
- What can technology do to and for family practice?
- What is the science base of family practice, and how will it be developed?
- How are family doctors agents of political and social change?
- What opportunities have we missed, and what bad deals have we made?
- What does family practice need to do next?
"We'll examine the soul of the discipline of family medicine," says AAFP Executive Vice President Robert Graham, M.D., who will serve as convener during Key-stone III and edit its proceedings.
"If we don't attend to our own evolution, no one will do it for us," says Stephens. "The natural evolution of medicine in the United States will not be, in and of itself, supportive of things family practice stands for. We don't 'own' any part of the body or any machines that give us identity. Our identity is connected to our patients, our communities, our role -- a front-line, communicative role. It's hands-on. It's hard to delegate. Our deepest meaning is in the personal dimensions of medical care and helping patients deal with the way their lives are affected by their medical problems."
Family physicians know when people are suffering because they don't have health insurance or because the health system is hard-nosed and oppressive, says Stephens. "Even though family practice, from its unpromising beginnings, has become the second-largest U.S. specialty and has political strength, the problems in medicine have multiplied, and we're at the mercy of what's out there."
The Society of Teachers of Family Medicine is managing logistics for Keystone III, and the AAFP Center for Policy Studies in Family Practice and Primary Care is coordinating the program. About 80 persons will attend the meeting, including 40 chosen by lottery from applications submitted last month. For more information, see http://www.aafp.org/keystone.
FP Report is published by the AAFP News Department.
Copyright © 2000 by American Academy of Family Physicians.
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