Watch your mailbox for your newly redesigned issue of Medical Meetings magazine, now known as MEETING
SNET/medical. We've added a few new things—check out these highlights of some of what’s happening around the social Web, and photos from last December’s West Coast Pharma Forum and the Alliance for Continuing Education in the Healthcare Profession’s annual conference in January, also available online. And, as the publishing world is shifting to the online environment, we’ve beefed up MeetingsNet.com, and will be publishing the print edition quarterly instead of bimonthly. But our core mission has not changed.
I’m sure you can relate, since it’s also what you have been going through—changing formats and strategies as the community you serve changes, while keeping your focus on improving performance and patient outcomes. As one of the keynote speakers at the ACEHP annual meeting in San Francisco pointed out, the way we address healthcare in the U.S. is changing from the old Flexnerian command-and-control construct to something more collaborative and engaging, whether we like it or not.
It’s so much more comfortable to fall back on our CME narrative, our oft-told story of how the system, and our microsystem within it, works. We may be able to cure some of its ills by parsing the story, but what we really need to get to, as final plenary speaker and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Margaret Edson, MA, EdS, so eloquently showed us, is finding ways to heal, not just cure, what ails our post-graduate medical education system.
We do that through dialogue, by looking each other in the eye and, regardless of the title we hold or the type of organization we serve, connecting with our true selves and the true selves of others. It can be hard to articulate—even Edson could only say, “I’m my most me when I’m with you”—but when it happens, it’s magic.
As the normally not very touchy-feely crowd rose to their feet to give her a standing ovation, I saw people embracing and smiling through tears. There was a feeling of hope in the room, and of discovery as many of us were, at that moment, connecting with and sharing our most-true selves. We got to feel first-hand just how powerful it could be to bring our hearts and souls, along with our heads and hands, to our work. And it is powerful indeed.