As the first Newsletter of my term, I would like to thank you for trusting me with this incredible honor. I would also like to thank Dr. Alan Yeasted, Dr. Thomas Grau, and Dr. Melissa McNeil for reaching out to me with advice.

My first priority is to affirm the ACP position as your partner and resource for accurate information for both clinical as well as “real life” needs.

I plan to reach out to our colleagues at all settings; community, academic, traditional internal medicine, hospitalist, and subspecialist to seek your input looking for areas of improvement and growth. We need to take advantage of the available virtual tools to meet on regular basis first to listen to your needs and to update you with upcoming ACP activities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought challenges, but it has also taught us many lessons and created opportunities. As we all talk about equity, I observe notable misinformation and mistrust as a barrier to taking advantage of available preventive measures for both COVID-19 as well as many preventable medical conditions. I plan to initiate community outreach activities to discuss barriers to care, from COVID vaccines to cancer screening and beyond.

I would like to seek your participation in ACP advocacy work. It is hard to browse through any medical journal without finding an article on physician burnout. However, I see most of the attention being focused on different forms of exercise, mindfulness, and mental health; and very few addressing the root causes of the problem, long work hours, extensive documentation, unpredictable insurance coverage, the constant addition of tasks within a limited time, frustrating barriers to provide care to needy patients, etc. The ACP has been leading the way for genuine and meaningful reforms and connects with the state as well as national policymakers to improve the environment of care. This work needs to be shared with you. We all have to do our part.

I also like to take advantage of the expanded role of virtual meetings to initiate regular board preparation sessions involving residency programs as well as community physicians and launch forums for case discussions.

We are very excited about the new Annals for case reports journal and advise you to read and participate at this platform for case-based learning.

I also plan to reach out to other medical organizations, family medicine, pharmacy, etc., to consolidate our efforts.

I truly encourage everyone to be an active participant in these activities. Please feel free to contact me or my colleagues in leadership with questions, comments, concerns, or suggestions.  We can be reached at the link below.

https://pa-acp.org/leadership-pennsylvania-american-college-of-physicians/

Ibrahim Isaac Ghobrial, MBBCh, FACP, MRCP
Governor, Western Region