I am honored to have the privilege of serving as the 84th President of the American College of Chest Physicians. When I attended my first CHEST meeting, I sat in the opening plenary session with thousands of other members, never imagining that I would have the opportunity to lead the organization just two decades later. And while I don’t recall many sessions from that meeting, I vividly remember the way it made an emotional impact. I never felt like one of a drove of nameless learners; both faculty and staff made it a collegial experience, much like attending pulmonary grand rounds at my own institution. Speakers would stay after their presentations to answer questions from even the most junior members. Leadership made themselves available over coffee or in the hallways between sessions. And that experience was the first of a great many memorable interactions I have had with CHEST.
Courtesy of American College of Chest Physicians
Dr. David a. Schulman
CHEST has meant a great deal to me personally; it served as my first professional home away from home. I had the opportunity to grow in a number of different areas through my service to CHEST, in ways that I would not have been able to do easily at my own institution. I’ve worked with incredible staff and volunteers in my service on a number of our committees, including the Council of NetWorks, the Training and Transitions Committee, the Education Committee, and the Program Committee, to name a few. While I’ve had a chance to learn what role each of these component parts of the College serves during my tenure on those committees, it wasn’t until far more recently that I better understood the role of the President. Before I get into what I’d like to achieve during my year as President, I’d like to briefly review what that role entails.
Contrary to popular belief, the President does not set the organizational goals for CHEST; those are set by the Board of Regents. While I will have the privilege of running the Board meetings, it is the seventeen incredibly talented folks who serve as voting members of the Board that set the College’s direction. Once the organizational goals are set, it is our committees that take charge of designing and implementing plans to work toward those goals. Concomitantly, Dr. Robert Musacchio (CHEST chief executive officer and executive vice president) meets with his own executive leadership team to design a structure that lets the CHEST staff work, both on their own and in tandem with our members, to achieve these goals. One of the President’s main roles, as I see it, is to serve as a liaison. When the Board makes decisions that affect the membership, it will be my job to communicate changes and why they are being made. When our members have challenges that the College might be able to help solve, it is my role to work with the Board and the CEO to see what we can do about them. And when there is need to interface with other organizations, the President (or their designee) can speak on behalf of the College in those interactions.
In the context of those duties, what are the things that I would like to accomplish during my tenure as CHEST president? First, I want to spend more time with our committees and you, our members. CHEST is a member-focused organization; I believe that this is the main thing that sets our professional society apart from its sister societies. I have always found CHEST to be very collegial and welcoming. But I am aware that some of our members haven’t always found it accessible. And I get that; our structure is complex. That’s the reason I provided a description of my role, and the reason that I intend to spend time making CHEST more accessible to all of you. We’ve already developed dedicated social media channels for a number of our NetWorks in order to make you all more aware of their activities. In the coming year, I’ll provide regular updates to membership about ongoing CHEST activities. I’ll work to provide more member awareness of what role each of our committees plays in forwarding the College’s goals. And I’ll provide you with more information about the type of qualifications that each committee seeks in its nominees, in an effort to encourage you to run for a leadership position that best suits your interests and skill set.
While improving our members’ understanding of the inner workings at CHEST will help each of you better see how the College can meet your needs, my hope is that this increase in organizational accessibility will motivate each of you to engage more actively with us. This is my second goal as President. For some of you, that engagement may take the form of joining our Twitter chats; for others, it could mean attending one of our live learning courses in Chicago for the first time. But I hope that some of you will consider submitting session proposals to our annual meeting for the first time, or running for an available leadership position within the College when nominations open in the Spring.
As our organization grows (now almost twenty thousand members strong!), I want to provide a second home for all our members, spanning the range from medical students to full professors, from lifelong academic physicians to those just starting out in community practices, from busy clinicians to physician scientists, and including all members of the healthcare team. Although the makeup of our volunteer leadership is becoming more representative of the full breadth of our membership, we are not fully there yet. Until we get to that intended target, I would like to ask each of you to reach out to me with any thoughts about how CHEST can better meet your professional needs. Creating greater access to leadership to let each of your opinions be heard is my third goal as President of CHEST. I’ll provide more details about how I’m hoping to achieve this in the coming months.
The world has been a crazy place over the last eighteen months, filled with challenges that we could never have foreseen even a year prior. Our members have been on the front lines of the pandemic; in addition to the professional stresses related to caring for innumerable critically ill patients, many of us have suffered personal losses. Although none of us knows what 2022 holds, I look forward to a brighter future, knowing that regardless of what the coming year brings, we will face it together.