Commitment to evidence drives FP’s work on women’s health initiative

You already were serving on your state chapter board when you were asked to get involved with WPSI. Why did you want to be the family doctor in that room?

I think getting to be a commission chair really deepened my commitment to evidence-based medicine. Getting to play a role and being a voice for family medicine when looking at evidence-based policies, especially for preventive care, felt like an important space to occupy.

What’s an example of rewarding and important work on WPSI’s recommendations that you’ve been involved in?

Last year I served as the chair for the Breast Cancer Screening Subcommittee. We worked to craft language regarding the fact that if you have an abnormal mammogram, getting the follow up—whether it’s an additional imaging, ultrasound or a biopsy—should be considered part of the screening process. We were trying to make sure patients can get coverage for those parts of the process as well.

The deadline for AAFP commission applications is October 15. Why do you encourage your peers to get involved?

The commission meetings are incredibly well structured, well run and efficient meetings where you get to do a lot of work in a short period of time. You get to work with committed, passionate family physicians from all around the country, which really offers a valuable insight and perspective into how medicine is affected by state and local policies.

How did serving as a commission chair help you in other leadership roles?

That really broadened my skills, which has been helpful to me in my career. It helped me think about, how can I improve my leadership as a local leader and rise higher in my organization to help with organizational decisions?

Also, I want to mention that we have really wonderful AAFP staff supporting physicians who are in the subcommittee chair and chair roles. They deserve a lot of credit for making it easy for a practicing physician to pick up and start participating in that process.

Did you have a woman mentor who influenced your decision to get on the leadership path?

I was really fortunate to have three women within my home state that were really great at demonstrating, and living the values of, being an involved leader in family medicine. Two were former MAFP presidents: Deb Dittberner, MD, MBA; and Renee Crichlow, MD, FAAP. I met them when I was a local chapter president. Then as I rose up to serve on the board of the MAFP and got into the leadership pathway, I got to work with them more closely.

Deb was a great example of someone who used their business and leadership skills to make a health system successful. Renee is a warm, empathic person who’s incredibly bright, curious, and does a great job of drawing people into conversations, which is so important as a leader. You want to make sure you hear all the perspectives, and she does such a wonderful job of that.

My residency program director, Kathleen Macken, MD, was wonderful at being a very thoughtful family physician who really understood the value of caring for people in a community and really looking after the health of a whole family while being smart, direct and kind as a leader and really helping to nurture people.

How do you pay that forward with students, residents or younger doctors?

I don’t have a lot of opportunity in my day-to-day practice right now to work with students and residents on a regular basis. But I try and encourage people in my role as a leader within my organization and talk to people about what leadership can look like, how it can feel, what it looks like with practice.

Know the things that leadership opportunities can afford you in terms of building relationships, helping to elevate the voice of family medicine and primary care and adding a set of skills. Just like we encourage people to follow their clinical interests in medicine, if leadership is interesting to you, figure out how we can help foster that.

Any final thoughts about women in leadership?

Sometimes the question that gets asked of women in leadership is, how do they balance it with their families? That gets to be hard because not every woman in leadership wants, or has, a family. That’s not a direction I try and bring up, but I do try and serve as an example of somebody in leadership who has a family.

It is possible to balance all these things. Sometimes it doesn’t feel balanced. Sometimes there’s a push or pull toward one area over the other. For my family, getting to see me do things that really bring me joy and that I find a lot of value in has helped them understand that, “Oh, if Mom needs to be away for a little bit, she’s doing something important, and she values the time she has with us when she comes back.”