Most chapters for SHM begin with a gaggle of hospitalists meeting up and becoming friends, bound by shared work experience.
Things work differently in the Sacramento chapter, founded as a provisional chapter just last year by a gaggle of hospitalists who were already friends, bound by shared life experience.
Dr. Atencio
“We’re all a group of friends who went to residency together, and we all worked at local hospitals in the Sacramento region,” said chapter president Adrienne Atencio. “There was always a need to unite all the local hospitals in our region. So, we thought that having a chapter would be a really great way to accomplish that.”
The leadership board of the chapter has representation from nearly a half-dozen hospitals in the region—and the group isn’t done yet.
“Our goal over the next year or so is to expand to even more hospitals in the area,” said Dr. Atencio, an assistant clinical professor and co-chair of clinical operations for the division of hospital medicine at the University of California Davis Medical Center. “The Sacramento region is very large, and there’s a lot of hospitals that we haven’t even tapped into yet. Our goal is to do more targeted outreach to add to our, so to speak, friend group or network, so we can communicate and problem-solve together. We’ve faced a lot of the same issues in this area.”
One might think that a brand-new chapter wouldn’t be organized enough for a poster competition. As is the Sacramento gang’s way, that person would be wrong.
“We already set a date,” Dr. Atencio said. “It’s going to be October 12th. And we’ve invited the two medical schools in our area— UC-Davis and California Northstate University College of Medicine. We’re working on inviting the” physician assistant “and nursing schools. And we invited all of the local residencies.”
The poster competition is the latest attempt by the chapter to do outreach.
“We wanted to do it because medical students and residents are the future of our chapter and the future of hospital medicine,” Dr. Atencio said. “Getting them engaged early and seeing the benefits of being involved with the Society of Hospital Medicine is important. And we’re hoping that it also stimulates the membership aspect and grows our chapter. That’s really the big benefit on our end for doing it.”
Outreach doesn’t stop at the poster competition. Dr. Atencio and her leadership board are scheduling as many meetings as they can to bring folks together.
“One of the ways you keep engagement is just continuing to have meetings on a really frequent schedule,” Dr. Atencio said. “If you have meetings only twice a year, people start forgetting about you. But if you have meetings on at least a quarterly basis, and there’s always something going on, you never fall out of the minds of the people involved in your chapter.
“And I think the other thing about having frequent meetings is that it has to be something that is important to people. So, we’ve been really deliberate with the meetings that we’ve chosen and try to mirror what the group is asking for…interestingly, the group is interested in medical topics, but more than anything they seem to want to establish friendships with each other across the hospitals in our region.”
The goal is to get as many different folks involved as possible, so the chapter isn’t just academic institutions or just downtown city hospitals. Particularly for a chapter whose geographic reach spreads out some 50 miles in every direction.
“It just makes our institutions better when you can see what other people are doing at hospitals adjacent to you, and what’s working and what’s not working for them,” Dr. Atencio said. “A great example is, that APPs [advanced practice practitioners] are really new to the practice of hospital medicine, and at one hospital in particular, we’ve had a very tough time getting physician buy-in and incorporating them into our group. But some of the other hospitals in our area have been working with APPs much longer than we have and are integrating them much more smoothly. When you’re doing these things, it really helps to have a friend in the area who has either done that or has gone through that and to call on that person to give you advice. It just makes your life so much easier.”
Diversity might be Dr. Atencio’s favorite part of the nascent chapter. Whether it be geography, career tenure, subspeciality, or something else—the group wants to represent everyone it can.
“We are really special, and we have participation from not just physicians, but from [advanced practice practitioners], practice administrators, medical students, residents,” she said. “It’s a great diversity of voices. That’s the special sauce when there are a lot of people at the table. More voices and more involvement mean more excitement.”
Richard Quinn is a freelance writer in New Jersey.