April 2016 President’s Message
Kevin Rossi, MD
2016 is passing very quickly and there is a lot of activity going on within the specialty of family medicine in your state and county chapters!
Your Los Angeles County Executive Committee met and mapped out our goals for the year. In addition to our continued focus on recruiting students and residents to our profession, we are planning activities focused on advocacy and prevention of opioid abuse.
I was impressed to see so many of our members at the All Member Advocacy Meeting in Sacramento in early March. A large crowd of practicing family physicians, residents and students came together for 3 days at The Citizen Hotel downtown. We spent time updating ourselves with the current issues for our specialty, elected new leaders and stormed the Capital the last day. Workforce issues were predominant and we advocated for continued support of family medicine residencies through Song-Brown funding. It was particularly helpful to have residents and students discuss their issues with debt load and the limited number of residency slots in California. Your Los Angeles chapter also won the prize for the most donations to Family Physicians Political Action Committee (FP-PAC), our advocacy fund.
I have been representing the county chapter on a committee entitled the SafeMedLA – safe prescribing Medical Practice Action Team (MPAT). This is a large team composed of providers, administrators and leaders of medical societies coming together to reduce the dangers and problems associated with the use of opioids in LA County. Much of our work has already impacted practices in emergency departments, urgent care centers and we’re about to involve primary care physicians, as well as specialties, in our activities. These activities involve establishing best practices and robust pain management support.
To this end, please join your colleagues for our May dinner event to discuss this major issue. Our guest will be Linda Singer, an attorney involved in large class action lawsuits regarding opioids and pharmaceutical companies. She spoke to our Executive Committee and we had a very lengthy engaging and informative discussion about the difficulties opioids present in our practices.
Please join us for our free dinner event the evening of May 12 at the Marmalade Café in the Grove. I look forward to seeing all of you.
