I had a very unique opportunity last night to have dinner with a rising star in Primary Care Advocacy. Dr. Andrew Morris-Singer is founder of Primary Care Progress which is an organization created following two significant events. First involves Dr. Andrew and what guided him toward primary care in the first place. In his standard presentation, he shares the story of how his own mother did not have a primary care physician and almost died because of our broken health care system. This event occurred when Dr. Andrew was a senior medical student.
The second event that caused the creation of the organization was the 2009 announcement at Harvard Medical School that the Primary Care Division was going to be defunded. At that point, Primary Care activists gathered to fight this decision and to try to build a new primary care vision for the school and for the community. As others around the country heard this story, other medical school campuses were interested in creating their own Primary Care Progress Chapter.
In the video below, you'll see the closing remarks made by Dr. Andrew from last night's presentation at Northeastern Ohio Medical University. There was also a great question and answer session from the students who attended the talk.
Following the close of the session, I had the opportunity to chat with Dr. Andrew over dinner about Primary Care Progress and advocacy for primary care/family medicine. A realization occurred to me that to further the cause of the Family Medicine Revolution, collaboration must occur with organizations like Primary Care Progress.
The Primary Care Community must stop working in our silos and come together under the big umbrella (or big tent) of Primary Care, Practice Innovation, and concepts like the Patient Centered Medical Home. You can see from this week's National Primary Care Week and Voices For Primary Care project - there is common ground that can be found among Family Medicine, General Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, and other primary care groups. We must stop working in our separate advocacy silos and come together with one Primary Care message.
Dr. Morris-Singer is a fascinating guy with lots of ideas, a strong advocacy background, and tremendous network of contacts that is growing everyday. I look forward to future collaborations with Primary Care Progress, and I thank everyone in my network who helped make the Voices for Primary Care initiative so successful. Hopefully this 2012 National Primary Care Week is a spark that will ignite a fire (Escape Fire?) of Advocacy that will carry through for the years to come...