State Chapter Focuses on Public Awareness

by Larry Weiss, MD JD FAAEM

AAEMLa held its quarterly open Board meeting on February 15 at Barreca’s Restaurant in Metairie, LA (everything in New Orleans must revolve around great food). Attendees included James Callaghan, Andy Mayer, Bob Chugden, Keith Van Meter, Brian DeHart, Sylvia Cusimano, and Larry Weiss. The most important item of business involved the authorization to create a political action committee. The Board approved this motion unanimously. We will only lobby our state legislature on Emergency Medicine related issues in our state. We will encourage all of our members to support our state PAC as well as AAEM PAC. The PAC’s affirmed the following issues for our PAC to pursue:

• Support legislative efforts to regulate managed care on a state level
• Oppose legislative efforts to expand the ability of non-physicians to practice medicine
• Work with Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) to enhance penalties for intoxicated drivers and make our streets safer
• Permissive (rather than mandatory) reporting of intoxicated drivers
• Enhanced penalties for assaults of emergency health care providers
• Promote adoption of standards to practice Emergency Medicine in Louisiana

Our Board decided to make public awareness a high priority. We decided to develop a pamphlet for our patients describing board certification in Emergency Medicine. We will also look into the possibility of placing advertisements. We also decided to create a newsletter. We will distribute the first issue in print format and it will contain photographs from our annual meeting last November. We will probably distribute future issues by e-mail.

We continue to have a positive cash flow despite our minimal dues structure, thanks to the astute management abilities of our volunteer Executive Director, Sylvia Cusimano, MHA. Our next Board meetings will take place on August 16. We will have our second annual meeting in November, and invite all AAEM members to attend.

Dr. Larry Weiss is the President of AAEMLa and can be reached at ldweiss@cox.net.

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