also increased our relationship with the city’ s board of health with the hard work of Wayne Tuckson, your new President-Elect. This influence has resulted in great success with the last two legislative cycles with this year the“ Medical Review Panels” legislation passing. I want to thank Frank Burns and the whole Policy and Advocacy Team for their hard work as well as the hard work of your GLMS staff, Bert Guinn and the KMA.
If that were all, it would be an enormous amount to be proud of but the Society has also been hard at work serving you in other ways. We continue to offer educational sessions focusing on business aspects of medicine. Under Dr. Couch’ s direction, we started a Physician Wellness Program for burned out physicians, which has been helpful for our members. We are also proud to be active in celebrating our medical students with the Career Chats / Specialty Speed Networking and White Coat Ceremony events. Lastly, I just want to thank all those who have served on a committee. Your time and insights are really appreciated.
As I said earlier, when thinking about a birthday you are celebrating the past and hopeful for the future. Well I am very hopeful, because we have a lot planned to continue making your society great. I mentioned the sale of the Old Medical School Building, and that sale required us to move to another building. Our new space offers many possibilities for future events including networking events. I hope you take some time today and explore GLMS’ s new home.
We also realize that there is always room for improvement, and we do listen to your concerns and wish to make your lives easier. Therefore, I would like to inform you we are going to be working, under the leadership of Dr. Jeffrey Goldberg, to improve the CAPS process. I don’ t want to give to many specifics but we really want this to be a first-class program of which we can all be proud. We also will start to work on improving the offerings from our Medical Society Professional Services( MSPS). At this point, I can only tell you to stay tuned.
I also mentioned the GLMS Foundation earlier. The Foundation worked with a team from Leadership Louisville over the last several months and plans on some new initiatives to better serve GLMS and the community at large. I think this is very exciting and will create many volunteer opportunities for our members and allow the Society to give even more to the Louisville community.
The leadership of your Society feels it is ready to propel itself like a rocket forward and meet the demands of the current healthcare atmosphere through our various new initiatives. To symbolize this excitement, hope and vision we have come up with a new logo for GLMS.
The new logo signifies the direction we envision for the Society and yet still captures our tradition. The new logo is a fleurde-lis with a snake wrapped around the center three times and composed of the colors red, blue and purple. Each element of the
EVENTS logo is a reminder of who we are, how our individual parts merge into a unified presence, and how we relate to our state and national societies.
The fleur-de-lis has been around since the Greek and Roman cultures but became a symbol of French royalty and symbolized perfection, light and life. The connection with the medical society which has had a fleur-de-lis since the society was known as the Jefferson County Medical Society, is with the city of Louisville. In 1953, the Austrian Victor Hammer designed the seal of the city of Louisville which included three fleur-de-lis, 13 stars and the year 1778 all on a blue background. The fleur-de-lis harkened back to the origin of the city’ s name, which was named Louisville to honor King Louis XVI of France. The 13 stars represented the 13 original colonies, and 1778 was the year the city of Louisville was founded. The seal changed in 2003 with the merger of Louisville and Jefferson County but still has the fleur-de-lis as its primary symbol. Interestingly, to answer a possible trivia question, that seal created by Victor Hammer was the fourth seal created for the city of Louisville. The other three included a seal with a steamboat in 1828, one with a locomotive in 1861, and one with both in 1910. Now, however, the fleur-de-lis has become a recognizable symbol of the city of Louisville for any Louisvillian.
Therefore, the fleur-de-lis reminds us of our connection to our traditions but also to the community we serve. The three leaves of the fleur-de-lis and the three rings the snake forms signifies three aspects of the society( GLMS, the GLMS Foundation and MSPS) all working together for the community’ s health and bound by a uniform purpose of making the lives of physicians and their patients better. The goal is to remind us that all elements of the Society should be closely aligned and working together to better serve the general community and our members. The colors also have a deep significance. The color blue ties us to our state society, the Kentucky Medical Association. The color red ties to the city of Louisville and to the noble ideals of leadership, passion and courage, and the blended colors forming a purplish hue tie us to our national society, the American Medical Association.
I really hope you enjoy the new logo and take it as a sign that the Society is hard at work for you, continuing the great things we have done and constantly trying to improve.
In closing, I am reminded of the words of the actor Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame,“ I’ m looking forward to the future and feeling grateful for the past.”
Thanks, and remember this is your Society: so own it.
Dr. Zaring is an anatomic and clinical pathologist with Louisville Pathology Associates and practices at Jewish Hospital.
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