Baylor resident to represent family medicine in AMA
Eddie Joe Turner, M.D.
Eddie Joe Turner, M.D., a family medicine resident in the Baylor College of Medicine Northwest Family Medicine Residency Program in Houston, has been chosen to represent family medicine residents within the American Medical Association.
The AAFP Board Chair appointed Turner to a one-year term as the AAFP Resident Alternate Delegate to the AMA-Resident Fellow Section upon the recommendations of the Commission on Education’s Resident and Student Screening Committee. In this role, Turner will represent AAFP within the AMA-RFS Congress of Delegates, provide a resident perspective within the AAFP-AMA delegation and will present a report to the AAFP Resident Congress of Delegates.
In his letter of interest for the position, Turner said that the United States is in a “critical transitional period,” whereby health care will be transformed forever. “The AMA will be a proponent for this change to take place and we need influential and effective leadership in every level of the AMA that will spearhead this change.”
Though this is his first AAFP leadership role as a resident, Turner has been involved in AAFP since his first year of medical school at the University of Tennessee in Memphis. He served as a student member on the AAFP Board of Directors, the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine Board of Directors and the Tennessee Academy of Family Physicians Board of Directors. Turner was also president of the Family Practice Student Association at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine and was a member of the AAFP Commission on Legislation and Governmental Affairs. Within TMA, he has been chosen to serve as chair-elect of the TMA Resident Fellow Section and has served on TMA’s Committee on Physician Distribution and Health Care Access and Council on Socioeconomics. Turner is currently the Larry A. Green Visiting Scholar at the Robert Graham Center in Washington, D.C.
Turner will attend his first official meeting in this new role—the 2007 Interim Meeting of the AMA House of Delegates—November 2007 in Honolulu, Hawaii.
JPS resident wins national poster competition
Roxanne Ho, M.D., receives top honors at AAFP’s Resident Research Poster competition.
Roxanne Ho, M.D., a third-year resident with the John Peter Smith Hospital Family Medicine Residency Program in Fort Worth, won first place in the AAFP Resident Research Poster contest at the Scientific Assembly in October.
Ho received $700 for the poster, “Adequacy of Colposcopic Biopsies in Family Medicine and OB/Gyn Clinics.” Her research examined how often cervical biopsies result in an adequate sample of tissue as opposed to small fragments. She compared the performance of obstetrics and gynecology residents and family medicine residents, finding that the rate of adequate biopsies was the same between the specialties. The obstetrics and gynecology clinic had a slightly higher rate of severe cervical pathology (cervical dysplasia).
Ho attended medical school at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.
Texas residents elected to AAFP posts
Tobie-Lynn Smith, M.D., M.Ed.
Two Texas residents were elected to AAFP leadership positions at the Aug. 4 National Congress of Family Medicine Residents and Medical Students. Tobie-Lynn Smith, M.D., M.Ed., of San Antonio will represent residents on the AAFP Board of Directors, and Emily Briggs, M.D., M.P.H., of San Antonio will serve as Resident Chair of the 2008 national conference.
Smith, a third-year resident at CHRISTUS Santa Rosa Family Medicine Residency in San Antonio, has served on the TAFP Board of Directors and the AAFP Commission on Quality. She decided to get involved in AAFP because of her work in downtown San Antonio with the underinsured and uninsured. Through the Bexar County Medical Society, she learned more about working with organized medicine to create positive change in the system. Once she was appointed to an AAFP commission, Smith saw how family physicians differed from other specialists.
“I was amazed at how passionate family docs are about taking care of our patients and changing our health system for the better,” Smith says. “I think that with what is going on with health care reform nationally right now and with this coming election, it is an exciting time to be involved in AAFP and TAFP, to work to reform health care in the direction for which we all choose family medicine—because we believe we can provide the best care for our patients as family physicians.”
Changes in health care policy will affect residents the most because they have the most years left to practice, Smith says. For this reason, she encourages more residents to get involved in AAFP and TAFP and stay informed of health care policy to “keep moving family medicine in the right direction.”
Briggs agrees with Smith. “We need to be the voice of family medicine during this exciting time of innovation,” she says. “We as residents must do our part to improve the specialty of family medicine, from encouraging quality medical students rotating at our programs to join our specialty, to participating in changing policy at the state and national level.”
Briggs, a second-year resident at CHRISTUS Santa Rosa in San Antonio, became involved as a first-year medical student. She held various positions within TAFP such as chair of the TAFP Section on Students and student representative to the TAFP Executive Committee. In 2006 she was elected to be one of two resident alternate delegates to the AAFP Congress of Delegates, and she continued to serve in this position for the 2007 Congress in October.