Advocacy

Advocacy is the opportunity to speak out on issues in an attempt to educate and influence policy makers on issues such as access, quality and cost of health care.

Advocacy extends beyond the provision of good clinical care and individual patient counseling to include collaboration with individuals and organizations to combat interpersonal, structural, and systematic inequities and abuses in our society.

All patients have the right to timely, high-quality emergency care.

Advocacy is the bridge that links patient care with efforts to address social determinants of health, institutional prejudices, and physical obstacles that patients and communities face when attempting to access (emergency) health care.

Emergency physicians are especially qualified to advocate on behalf of social change, given their unique practice and predisposition to care for all comers. Emergency physicians often witness the impact of health policy decisions on individual patients.

Academic emergency physicians in particular are qualified to advocate for patients via enhanced resident education and healthcare research. Academic emergency physicians also have a voice within institutions that are positioned to effect real change. 

Advocacy (2010 - 2015)

Goal: To foster a premier organization in research and education, with members who are advocates for the specialty, the application of their work, and patients.

Objectives

• Collaborate with key organizations to enhance the voice of academic emergency medicine and to promote unity within the specialty of emergency medicine around key issues
• Educate and mobilize the SAEM membership in individual and collective advocacy efforts as they relate to the primary mission of SAEM
• Establish, train, and mentor scholars whose focus is research or education based advocacy and its related policy application in academic emergency medicine