VOLUME 26, ISSUE 1
Anna M. Weyand, MD William H. King Award Recepient 2013 TSA Annual Meeting
Recognized Greater Houston Anesthesiology/U.S. Whatever else medicine may encompass at its core is the physician’s inviolable fiduciary relationship with his patients. We have the privilege and the duty to care for them and to act in their best interests. This responsibility, however, cannot be limited to the administration of medication or the performance of procedures. As physicians, most of us are more comfortable confining ourselves to the personal patient care that we provide, or to the science that provides the backbone of our discipline. However, this is plainly no longer enough. Medicine, for better or for worse, is now practiced in a global environment that is saturated with media and political influence. The effects of this environment on the practice of medicine and on our relationship with our patients — and therefore the quality of their medical care — are impossible to overestimate.
Healthcare decisions are made not only in the clinic and in the hospital, but also in the legislature.
The decisions made in this setting have no less an impact on our patients than those made in the hospital, and they are no less critical to the wellbeing and health of our patients. We have a plain duty to protect and to care for our patients in a larger sense, to advocate for their right to the best possible care. We must ensure that physicians have as much input into these legislative healthcare decisions as we have in administering the appropriate medication. It is tempting to view physician advocacy as an optional activity and something to put at the bottom of our ever-lengthening to-do lists. However, to do so is to fail to fulfill our core responsibility. Fundamentally, advocacy
Dr. N. Martin Giesecke presenting Dr. Anna M. Weyand with the William H. King Advocacy Award at the 2013 TSA Annual Meeting.
for physicians is inseparable from advocacy for our patients.
Political engagement is perhaps the most straightforward avenue of physician advocacy. Significant government involvement in healthcare is very much a reality in our system, and the trend towards increasing regulation of medical practices and reimbursement is unlikely to reverse. As our system has become more focused on cost control, other interest groups, often primarily focused on monetary gain and (even more often) ignorant of the realities of patient care, have succeeded in becoming dominant voices in discussions of healthcare policy. While it is reasonable to be apprehensive of many of the evolving changes,
continued and intensified political advocacy is absolutely crucial to protect our patients and our profession.
The indisputable value of physician-driven healthcare should be self-evident to any reasonable observer of the system. No other group has the broad-based knowledge of both the practical realities of patient care and the scientific evidence base, experience with the day-to-day operations of the healthcare system, and, frankly, the altruism demonstrated by the willingness to undergo significant personal sacrifice in the service medical training and the demands of patient care. Physicians are aware of this, of course, but we are too often convinced that the soundness of our opinions is
