NOTE: THE FOLLOWING TEXT IS TAKEN FROM A SPEECH MADE BY DR.
TAILOR AS PART OF THE PRESIDENTS' INSTALLATION.
Thank you, Dr. Burns, for an incredible year under your
leadership. Thank you to the Executive Officers and Board
for their leadership and support. Thank you to the GLMS
staff for all they do for our physician community. Thank
you to my practice partners and Norton Healthcare for
their encouragement and support in this position. Thank
you to my family and friends for their well wishes. Finally,
thanks to all of you, members of GLMS, for giving me the honor of
being President of your medical society.
Heroes. A word we are hearing a lot these days when it comes to
frontline workers and health care workers. I have heard some debate
on whether we should even use that term. Hero denies fallibility.
But I do not think that is the case. One of my favorite movie series is
Marvel Avengers. In the last movie of the series, Avengers Endgame,
we see our favorite heroes deal with failure as half of humanity across
the universe has been lost. We see the aftermath in this movie, how
our heroes deal with loss, with fallibility and with a new normal. As
health care workers in this uncertain time, we too have been labeled
heroes. We too face an uncertainty, a new normal, the grief of that
new normal, and try everything possible to combat our enemy. In
this COVID-19 world, we need each other more than ever, just like
the Avengers. As President of your medical society, over the next
year, we must learn to navigate our new normal, advocate for the
practice of medicine and our patients, and most importantly, care for
and empower ourselves so we can empower our patients together.
Life in January 2020, March 2020 and now May 2020 have all
felt very different from each other. The normal that we knew at the
beginning of the year will not be something we know again for some
time. Our patients will wait for us in the comfort of their vehicles
rather than waiting rooms. Our daily temperature checks for all who
enter our facilities will be of utmost importance. Our patients will
be at visits by themselves as we deliver news to them. We will wear
masks every day while at work. We will do as many of our visits
as possible via telehealth to protect our patients and our staff. Our
procedures will require extra steps and processes to screen for the
4 LOUISVILLE MEDICINE
virus. These small changes will be part of our new work normal. In
our daily lives, when will we as health care workers feel comfortable
in larger settings? When will we feel comfortable being around our
vulnerable family members and friends? I know these changes are
temporary for us, but the question remains of what time this will
take. What I do know is that we will have to tackle this new normal
and answer these questions together.
As we navigate this uncharted territory, we will all need each
other more than ever. Our differences that exist in our specialties
are now outweighed by our commonality of the practice and understanding
of medicine. Our decision makers, legislators and leaders
will seek our counsel on how to proceed forward. We will need to
have a collective voice of medicine, and organized medicine like
GLMS will be our venue to do that. COVID-19 has brought to light
areas of our society that do not work well from health systems to
socioeconomic constraints that affect our patients. We will need to
use our collective voices for medicine, for our patients, to advocate
for better access to care, better access to prescription drug pricing
and improving our patients’ social determinants of health. We
will need to use our collective voices for medicine for each other
to advocate for PPE, to help keep our practice doors open and to
advocate for continuing telehealth in our practices. Being a member
of organized medicine keeps us in the know as this global pandemic
continues. This will be of utmost importance as we will be fielding
questions about this virus and need to stay informed. Finally, we
will all be public health advocates, setting the example by wearing
masks and debunking misconceptions about the virus to better
inform our family, friends, and most importantly, our patients.
As we tackle this new normal, and use our collective voices
to advocate for medicine, physicians, we must not forget to heal
ourselves. My original theme for our year together was “Empower
the Physician, Empower the Patient.” In the age of COVID-19, our
focus on wellness and self-care have taken on an utmost importance.
In Avengers, we see our heroes trying to find stress relieving
techniques to help themselves feel better from support groups,
to binge drinking to curing an earthquake. Some of these coping
mechanisms are healthy, and some are not. As physicians, we will