Louisville Medicine Volume 68, Issue 1 | Page 6

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