VOLUME 26, ISSUE 2
“Do you have any message for the younger anesthesia community?”
“Oh yes I do. I think foremost, we need to be doctors and we need to pay attention to our patients. We need to take care of our patients. The patient-physician relationship should always be sacred and we should not allow anybody to interfere with that. Now in order to do that properly, I think our younger colleagues should be clinically skilled and knowledgeable so that they can actually do the service that is needed for patients. I’m very eager to promote scientific activity. That is one reason why I am still very active in a committee to establish the Giesecke chair at UT Southwestern, a chair that will have as its focus, research in anesthesiology. That is very important I think, next to clinical activity, we need to have research activity. None of that will ever lead to anything or count for anything unless we have the third leg, and that is advocacy. I think it was Bert Coffer from North Carolina who said ‘what happens to our patients is decided less in the labs of science than in the halls of congress. ‘Every second year in Texas at the Capitol in Austin and every year in the Capitol in Washington, there are thousands of bills advanced by people who want to disturb what we do as anesthesiologists. We need to be vigilant and pay very close attention to what is happening in the political world because that determines to a very large degree what we have to do. I would encourage every young anesthesiologist at a minimum, to join the professional organizations, and join the professional organization’s Political Action Committee (PAC). We have a TSAPAC that focuses on Texas politics and we have an ASAPAC that focuses on federal politics. At a minimum, I believe that every young anesthesiologist should have a little membership check going to those organizations to make sure nobody messes with what we need to do.”
“There’s one thing that I need to say about being the president of anything,” he said, “TSA, as well as ASA, and TMA, any medical organization, does not have just one figurehead who magically does all the work. This is a team sport. Nothing works without everybody on the team playing at the top of his or her game and playing in coordination with everybody else. That is what gets us results.. All of this is supported by the best staff that any medical society can have. Our office staff in Austin led by Chris Bacak is from out of this world. None of what I did I would have ever been able to do without help and support from them. The gavel I was given at the end of my tenure as President did not mark the end of my involvement. As a matter of fact, today I serve as the Chairman of the Board of the Texas Surgical Quality Collaborative and that is gearing up to be a very busy activity. This idea was brought to me just like many other ideas; I just picked up and ran with it.
Dr. David Mackey brought this idea to the TSA from Houston and now it is blossoming into a full-fledged organization. I am aiming to reduce Texas health care expenses by $1-3 Billion. That is phenomenal, but at the same time, there are proven ways and techniques to do that. So it just needs to be implemented. Texas anesthesiologists will hopefully handsomely benefit from this Quality Collaborative. The goal is to keep the physician in the driver’s seat, keep the doctor-patient relationship sacred and align the ethical, professional and financial interests of physicians and guide the patient, the doctor, the insurance company and the hospital to go all in the same direction. Once we have that alignment, we can do phenomenal things. It is an effort that came out of my presidency.”
