The Coastal Virginia Medical Society was founded on January 17, 2023 out of a need to create a larger, more effective organization of physicians and surgeons that could provide a voice for better healthcare for the eastern part of Virginia. Representatives from the Norfolk Academy of Medicine, Chesapeake Medical Society and the newly reformed Virginia Beach Medical Society met on that date and agreed to merge our three societies into one. By doing so, we can provide greater input into decisions made locally as well as at the state level regarding healthcare issues that affect patients and providers alike. We can also pool our resources and provide many more services and benefits for our members.
There are lots of voices in Eastern Virginia, as there are in most areas, that shape the healthcare in the community. These voices pull patients and providers in one direction or another, in some ways good and in other ways not so good. There are government interests, administrative concerns of hospitals and medical groups, rules and regulations from the Board of Medicine, the Board of Pharmacy, insurance companies, hospital policies, nursing policies, nurse practitioners, physicians' assistants, optometrists, nursing facilities, and other medical providers, all of whom have different interests and concerns and want things to happen in their best interests. Physicians, based on our extensive training in patient care, should have a large voice in that, but we currently have very little input in making any significant healthcare decisions that affect our community. We have a lot of the stress and responsibility but little control and no support.
We need a strong supportive organization that will give us a chair at the table when decisions are made that affect the lives of our patients and our own lives as well. Sure, we have the AMA and the ACP, but they can't help us locally or individually. We thankfully still have the Medical Society of Virginia, but if we don't have good grass roots organizations, I suspect that will dwindle away as well.
We need to re-establish ourselves as leaders in the health care community, making our concerns known when the systems prevent efficient and effective health care.
We should be leading the community in promoting good health care, thinking up new and better ways to take care of people, solving health-related problems that affect all of us. We should be a strong voice at the table where health care decisions are made. Currently, we are not there at all.
We know about medicine and about how to take care of patients, but we often don't speak up when new rules are written that interfere with that. If one of us speaks up, no one listens. If 800 physicians speak up, it might be effective.
We began these discussions near the end of last year and decided we needed to come up with a new focus and create new goals for the medical society, ones that would not only help redirect healthcare delivery and patient care, but also provide better support for its members. The following are the resolutions that we intend to achieve:
Stay up to date on issues and news you need to know. The CVMS Bulletin is published monthly and will list concerns that local physicians have expressed about healthcare in Coastal Virginia and how we can make it better. We will provide potential solutions and let you know what is happening behind the scenes to help solve these problems.
Things You Need to Know
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