Youth Leadership Forum Seeks FPs as Workshop Speakers

By Leslie Champlin
4/11/2007

The National Youth Leadership Forum on Medicine, or NYLF-Med, an organization that fosters interest among high-achieving high school students in medicine, wants young people to know more about family medicine as a career. That's why NYLF-Med has turned to the AAFP Division of Medical Education to identify speakers at the organization's youth conferences.

The request represents an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the growing need for primary care and the unique contributions that family medicine makes to health care, said Ashley DeVilbiss, manager of student interest in the AAFP Division of Medical Education.

"As an organization, they are shifting their emphasis to primary care," said DeVilbiss of the NYLF-Med. "Their sessions are focusing on public health, health care for the uninsured, preventive care -- issues that family doctors are dealing with. So they want to give more publicity to family medicine."

Each summer, 8,500 high-school juniors and seniors attend 23 NYLF-Med conferences in nine major U.S. cities: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston-Galveston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco and Washington, according to Cynthia Williams, director of medicine at NYLF.

The 10-day conferences introduce student participants to medical careers through discussions with health care leaders, including physicians. This year, the NYLF-Med conferences have 91 speaking opportunities available for family physicians and FP residents. Topics of the sessions are

"Health Care in the 21st Century: Elective Workshops on Medical Issues" which lets students interact in a comfortable environment with prominent medical professionals from the local community;
"Life as a Resident: An Insider’s Perspective," in which participants will hear how residents made decisions about their medical education and learn about meeting the educational requirements for becoming a doctor, financing a medical education, going through the National Resident Matching Program, and meeting day-to-day responsibilities of resident physicians; and
"What's Your Specialty?" in which students learn about the speaker's medical specialty, its educational requirements, day-to-day responsibilities and career potential; hear about the personal challenges and rewards of becoming a physician; and learn about the present and future issues surrounding a specific field of medicine.

In addition, students tour hospitals, medical schools, physician clinics, and public health and community resources.

Given the nation's health care needs, "we want to increase the emphasis on family medicine and primary care," said Williams. "We want to have a more realistic and better representation of the various fields of medicine. I'd like for students to be more exposed to family medicine."

Physicians interested in participating in an NYLF-Med conference can contact Ashley DeVilbiss at adevilbi@aafp.org or 800-274-2237, Ext. 6722.

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