Are you a medical student, or do you know one who is interested in learning more about advancing systemic change to improve the lives of women? Join the FemInEM Champions of Change Program! Read below to learn how this program impacted one student’s medical education, and find application information at the end.
Medical education teaches us how to care for the patient in front of us. We learn to recognize disease, develop differential diagnoses, interpret evidence, and select appropriate treatments. However, many factors that ultimately determine the care our patients receive exist beyond the exam room. Institutional policies determine the availability of treatments. Medical school curricula influence the management by future physicians. Research shapes clinical guidelines, professional organizations influence standards of care, and health policy determines whether patients can access care. As medical students, we spend years learning how to practice medicine in these systems. We spend considerably less time learning how to enact positive changes in them.
Going Beyond the Bedside
This was one of the things that drew me to FemInEM’s Champions of Change Leadership Program. As a woman pursuing emergency medicine, I was attracted not only to the program’s focus on reproductive healthcare but also to FemInEM’s broader commitment to supporting women on both sides of the physician-patient relationship: the women practicing medicine and the women entrusting us with their care.
This mission is particularly important to me because I attend medical school outside the United States. Training within another healthcare system is an invaluable part of my education, exposing me to different approaches to medicine, healthcare delivery, and the physician-patient relationship. However, conversations surrounding women’s health, reproductive healthcare, and advocacy are not always as prominent in my day-to-day medical education as I would like them to be. Champions of Change offered a novel opportunity: a structured opportunity to examine women’s healthcare through the interconnected lenses of clinical evidence, education, leadership, advocacy, and systems change. For me, this filled a critical gap.
Instead of just asking us to learn evidence-based care, the program encouraged us to consider what happens when we know what evidence-based care looks like, but the system makes it difficult to provide that care. Champions of Change introduces students to different avenues for change and, importantly, demonstrates that advocacy is not separate from the practice of medicine itself. Research, education, institutional leadership, professional organizations, and policies ultimately influence what happens at the bedside.
Why FemInEM
Getting involved with FemInEM resonated with me because its mission recognizes women physicians and women patients. Women have made gains in medicine; however, inequities in advancement and leadership persist. Research in academic medicine has identified disparities in promotion and leadership, as well as the importance of mentorship for advancement, satisfaction, productivity, and retention.¹˒² Similar concerns in academic emergency medicine have prompted calls to recruit, retain, mentor, develop, and promote women throughout their careers.³
Champions of Change provided me with a dedicated space to engage with these issues that plague medicine when they were not necessarily part of my everyday medical school conversations. This is one of the reasons why programs like this are important. Sometimes, an extracurricular educational experience does more than teach additional content. It permits learners and provides them with the foundation to begin asking questions that their formal curriculum may not yet ask.
From Medical Student to Changemaker
There can be a tendency during medical school to imagine physician leadership as something that begins later, after graduation, residency, fellowship, or your first faculty appointment.
The Champions of Change program challenges this assumption. Medical students occupy a unique position in healthcare, moving between classrooms, hospitals, specialties, and occasionally different healthcare systems. We experience curricula firsthand, observe variations in practice between departments and institutions, and participate in research and professional organizations while learning how medicine operates in practice. As we are still learning, we constantly ask why.
Why do we manage this condition this way?
Why is this topic missing from our curriculum?
Why is this treatment available in one institution but difficult to obtain in another?
Why do different patient populations experience different outcomes?
Champions of Change encourages the question, what can I do about it? Answering this question requires skills that are not always explicitly taught in traditional medical education. Meaningful change may require the identification of stakeholders, evaluation of evidence, navigation of institutional structures, coalition building, colleague education, research conduction, and engagement with professional organizations. It also requires recognizing that lasting changes are rarely accomplished alone.
The most valuable lesson I learned from the Champions of Change program is not a clinical fact or advocacy strategy, but a way of thinking about physicians’ responsibilities. Excellent medicine begins with caring for the patient in front of us, but our responsibility need not end when the encounter is over. We can ask whether the patient’s protocol reflects the best evidence, whether students and residents are prepared to provide care, whether our research asks the right questions, whether institutional policies create barriers, and whether patients’ and physicians’ voices are heard in the process.
When the answer is no, we can learn how to change it. For medical students interested in emergency medicine, reproductive healthcare, medical education, research, advocacy, public health, or leadership, FemInEM’s Champions of Change Leadership Program offers what traditional curricula often do not: a chance to learn how to improve the field of medicine. As a woman entering medicine, I want a profession where women can lead, mentor, research, teach, and shape the future of healthcare. As a future physician, I want women in my emergency department to receive equitable, evidence-informed care from clinicians who understand their needs. Champions of Change showed me that these aspirations are the same work: becoming a Champion of Change means supporting women changing medicine while changing it for the women we serve.
Ready to Become a Champion of Change?
Applications for the next cohort of FemInEM’s Champions of Change Leadership Program are opening soon. If you are a medical student interested in women’s health, emergency medicine, advocacy, leadership, or learning how to turn evidence into meaningful change, consider applying to join the next generation of Champions. Learn more about the program here and apply through FemInEM’s Champions of Change program page.
References
Farkas AH, Bonifacino E, Turner R, Tilstra SA, Corbelli JA. Mentorship of women in academic medicine: a systematic review. J Gen Intern Med. 2019;34(7):1322–1329. doi:10.1007/s11606-019-04955-2.
Carapinha R, Ortiz-Walters R, McCracken CM, et al. Impact of mentoring on academic career success for women in medicine: a systematic review. Acad Med. 2022;97(3):444–458.
Agrawal P, Madsen TE, Lall M, Zeidan A. Gender disparities in academic emergency medicine: strategies for the recruitment, retention, and promotion of women. AEM Educ Train. 2020;4(Suppl 1):S67–S74. doi:10.1002/aet2.10414.
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