Every year, the EMRA Board of Directors meets to plan the direction of the organization. Every 3 years, this meeting entails creating a specific strategic plan to provide guidance for the following 3 years. At the end of January, your EMRA Board of Directors came together to do this exact thing. Prior to this meeting, we surveyed your program representatives and the committee and division chairs and vice-chairs to better understand the needs of our membership.
The results were not unexpected. We learned we must engage members more, communicate better, become more efficient with project development, and improve our use of technology.
With this feedback, along with our vision for the organization, we created 3 priority areas:
- Make Membership Matter
- Ensure Organizational Sustainability
- Advocate for Emergency Medicine Physicians in Training
Over the next 2 months, we will be finalize objectives and tasks that correlate with these priority areas and help us bring this strategic plan to life. More specifically, I would like to address 3 particular areas of improvement that were discussed within the context of our strategic plan.
First, we are working to strengthen our committee and division functionality by improving communication between the board and these groups. This includes an easier mechanism for brainstorming and project proposal submission. Furthermore, we will offer more leadership training for our committee and division leaders, which will provide them with the tools necessary to become even more successful at managing teams and cultivating innovation. Finally, we will make it much easier for members to join committees or divisions via the website.
Second, we will continue advocating for EMRA members through volunteer member work. EMRA has liaisons to most every major group involved in medical education to ensure that emergency medicine resident, fellow, and medical student voices are heard. These groups include the ACGME Resident Review Committee for Emergency Medicine (RRC), the American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM), Emergency Medicine Foundation (EMF), Emergency Medicine Action Fund (EMAF), CORD, ACOEP, SAEM, and ACEP. We will continue to foster these relationships while constantly seeking new collaboration. Our goal is to be certain you are heard on issues most important to you as emergency medicine physicians in training.
Finally, we will continue to create an EMRA community who exchange ideas, produce content that furthers resident and student education and development, and interact on a personal level. We want to increase our engagement in social media. We also plan to revamp emra.org so it becomes more user-friendly.
We are excited about the future of EMRA. We are also lucky to have an amazing staff who work tirelessly to help us continue to improve and grow. We promise to regularly re-evaluate our efforts with the flexibility to meet your changing needs. As Socrates once said, “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” Over the next 3 years, it is our goal to take these words to heart.