STFM Blog

I often laugh when I reflect on what my vision of a family doctor was before I started medical school. To me, family doctors were “cough and cold” physicians who would see routine, uninteresting patients every 5 to 10 minutes, earning a minimal salary compared to their specialist colleagues. They had a broad scope of practice and, because of that, needed to refer complicated cases to specialists.

Carllin Man STFM Student Representatve

What was I thinking?

Having no formal exposure to family doctors in my preclinical curriculum, I received a broader introduction to family medicine during FMIG lunch hour sessions. While indulging in a free lunch, I came to realize that family medicine is not what I thought it was. I learned that family doctors are competent in a multitude of procedures, from incision and drainages to IUD insertions to mole excisions. They do all this while also delivering babies, treating coagulopathies, and managing chronic pelvic pain.

But unexpectedly, what struck me during these seminars was the sheer enthusiasm expressed by the family doctors. They looked truly happy and made it clear that they enjoy what they do. Many of them spoke of the great work/life balance they’d achieved and how family medicine allows them to be flexible in their professional lives, while still providing vital clinical services to their community.

What other specialty can boast all these things?

I often wonder if I would have chosen family medicine if I hadn’t attended the FMIG lunches. Gaining a true understanding of family medicine in my first year definitely affected how I looked at the other specialties during my clinical rotations. I have to believe that interest in family medicine would increase somewhat dramatically if medical students learned the true nature of family medicine earlier in their preclinical years.

Benjamin Miller, PsyD University of Colorado, Denver

This past December at the Conference on Practice Improvement, I had the opportunity to experience one of the most significant benefits of social media—the connections. Many of us involved in social media often talk about the importance of engagement. We know that without engaging, there is not a high likelihood we will establish a relationship with the person we are connected with.

Mark Ryan, MD, has written about how his conference experience was enhanced through relationships he established through Twitter. Social media has power, and this power can be realized through the meaningful connections and ongoing engagement in a larger health care community.

And make no mistake, social media can play a significant role in family medicine.

For example,

1. Social media allows for everyone, everywhere to get involved
2. Social media allows for timely action (advocacy – take SOPA as an example)
3. Social media allows for seamless communication (eg, between providers, patients and providers)
4. Social media technologies are often the first step in creating meaningful relationships
5. Social media can be an organizer
6. Social media can disrupt.

To offer a real life health care example of the power of social media in family medicine, consider what happened when Mike Sevilla, MD, used the social media platform to raise awareness around the pending cuts for graduate medical education. Mike’s #saveGME campaign was prolific. He was able to simultaneously educate masses through Twitter and Facebook the importance of these funds and encourage them to act. He used his connections through social media to make an impact on something that was important to him as a family physician and educator.

Looking back at Mark’s post and seeing what happened with Mike’s advocacy effort, I began to understand the true power of social media—what happens when we use these social media relationships to actually connect. What happens when these online “social” connections lead to real life engagement? What happens when we meet in real life and see that behind that avatar there is a person who can make a difference—a person that we can relate to?

While many involved in social media may have made this connection some time ago, it was not until the Conference on Practice Improvement while sitting at a table with Fred Trotter (@fredtrotter), Gregg Masters (@2healthguru), Jay Lee (@familydocwonk) and Mark Ryan (@RichmondDoc) that the true feeling of connection and how we could collectively change something in health care was felt.

In your family medicine role, are you connected to the health care community that exists outside of the walls of your residency? If not, you may want to test out those waters sometime soon as you never know what meaningful connections you will make that can help shape the future of family medicine.

Change in the weather, change in the sea,
Come back baby, you’ll find a change in me.
Everybody, they ought to change sometime,
Because sooner or later we have to go
down in that lonesome ground.—Eric Clapton
Listen to the song at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc954MtcJkA

Stacy Brungardt, CAE STFM Executive Director

Anybody out there love Eric Clapton? What a talent to be an artist who can entertain and give a message.

This song speaks to the value of change. At STFM, we’re working to embrace change, not just for the sake of change, but because you can either react to change or be proactive and guide change for the future you envision.

How are we doing this? By scanning the environment, asking tough questions of ourselves, talking to stakeholders outside our leadership, and taking a hard look at what we do well and what we strive to become.

For example, we’ve taken on online education. We’re not great at it yet. It takes us a long time to develop online programs, and we don’t have great processes in place for measuring their relevance to members. But we believe that STFM has to be great at providing other types of education beyond our outstanding meetings, so we’re willing to struggle through this learning.

Changing our logo is another example. After thoughtful research and conversations, we realize the logo doesn’t communicate the level of professionalism that STFM and this discipline should expect. We plan to celebrate how well our logo has served us and give it the retirement it deserves. You can expect to see some new logo ideas in February.

My New Year’s resolution for STFM is to preserve what is special about STFM and make the right changes for moving the Society forward.

Thank you for making these changes with us. It is an honor to serve you and the values you represent.

Jeri Hepworth, PhD, STFM President, & Stacy Brungardt, CAE, STFM Executive Director

Thanks to all of you who have commented on our logo drafts. As we discussed at the Board meeting, your input is an important part of our vetting process.

Please allow us to clarify this process.

The current logo has served us well, without question. It is a statement to members about our values.  However, as we increase our role with others, an internally-focused logo is not useful and can be detracting. Our role in medical education, transformation of health care, and advocacy work with governmental bodies and other professional organizations requires us to move forward with communications and messaging that convey the importance of the Society. Our recent communications audit tells us that others outside our membership (and even some within) don’t see our logo as one that communicates a professional, progressive organization. We celebrate our current logo, its history, and our founders who developed it. A new logo doesn’t undermine or ignore that history.

Your comments are part of an important vetting process that includes our membership, Board, and staff. The two logos that were presented are not the final logo choices, and we have not spent extravagantly in the design process.

Here’s what we are learning from our feedback gathering process.

1. Our members read our communications. Within 24 hours, 1,522 of you had opened the email, 689 had clicked through to the web page, and 701 had clicked through to President Jeri Hepworth’s blog post. It’s good to know our messages are reaching you.
2. Our members are engaged and feel a real connection to STFM. If you weren’t connected, you obviously wouldn’t care what our logo says/looks like.
3. Your suggestions are constructive. You didn’t just say, “I don’t like it,” you explained why, and provided recommendations. Overall, we didn’t get the sense that most of you are opposed to change, per se, you just don’t like the change direction.

We wish we could sit down with all of you and have a conversation to listen, learn, and discuss. It’s clear that many of you want a family symbol in the logo, and we understand how important the family and the relationships it represents mean to STFM. But, we’ve also had members tell us that the definition of family is changing, and the three-person image is not inclusive of all families.

If we show a family, how does that image differentiate us from, say, a family services agency, a church, a community park, or a YMCA? If we add a medical symbol to the family, perhaps we’re then showing family medicine, but that seems like it might make more sense for an AAFP logo. We’re really about education, so do we add a book or an apple to the family and medical symbol? That would be one busy logo.

Then, consider the logos for organizations that have probably invested mega-bucks for logo research. How do golden arches visually represent cheap hamburgers? And what does Walmart’s star/flower say about discount retail? Wouldn’t a picture of a car be a more literal logo for Mercedes than a triangle? Do we really need to repeat what’s in our organization’s name in images?

Logo design principles say logos should be simple, relevant, scalable, and memorable. Your feedback indicates we may have missed the mark on “relevant.” So, we ask you to continue to share your comments, below. This is a process and everyone at STFM is listening closely to what you’re saying.