Forging the Future of Family Medicine at the 2024 ADFM Annual Conference

We are pleased to share below some highlights from the 2024 ADFM Annual Conference, which took place February 20-24, 2024 in Palm Springs, California. Attendance was strong, with over 240 chairs, administrators, and other senior leaders from departments of family medicine in attendance. The theme of this year’s conference was Forging the Future of Family Medicine - Returning to our Roots in an Era of Dis-integration, and these concepts were woven throughout our programming.

We started the conference with preconference days, featuring dynamic workshops for both of ADFM’s fellowship programs—LEADS and BRC—as well as a session tailored to department administrators, another focused on using persuasion principles to build research capacity in family medicine, and one hosted by ADFM’s Leadership Development Committee focused on “Tools for Enhancing Your Leadership Skills.”

Our featured presentation on the first full day of the conference was a keynote, “Survive and Thrive: Moving Family Medicine into the Future,” from Tim Hoff, PhD. Building off recommendations for the specialty from his book “Searching for the Family Doctor: Primary Care on the Brink,” Dr Hoff spoke about many of the modern-day challenges facing primary care, including physician burnout, financial pressures, and corporatization of primary care. His framing as an outsider with an inside view (he was previously an administrator in a family medicine department and is now a business professor and researcher at Northeastern) created provocative discussion and reflection for the group.

Dr Hoff then set the stage for an experiential workshop by introducing 4 of his recommendations for how family medicine could potentially respond to these challenges: growing digital primary care, enhancing relational family medicine, building advocacy capacity for family physicians in the workplace, and cultivating career sustainability. Attendees then split into breakout sessions in these 4 areas to brainstorm action items that attendees could pursue to strengthen the specialty, following the 1-2-table-all format to generate a breadth of ideas and then to curate and amplify the ones the group found to be most promising. We are processing the outcomes of these discussions and look forward to sharing them in a future write-up.

The second day kicked off with highlights from the National Family Medicine Research Summit and was followed by an overview of the LEADS Fellowship program from LEADS Fellowship Program Director, Myra Muramoto, MD, MPH. Attendees then had the opportunity to attend Ignite-style Talks presented by the outgoing LEADS fellows, the culmination of their year-long projects. We were pleased to offer this opportunity again for our members to hear the progress the LEADS fellows made during their fellowship year! As a follow up to last year’s session on “Building Anti-Racist Cultures through a Commitment to Racial Humility,” and in continuation of our commitment to addressing anti-racism in academic family medicine, Chrysta Wilson, MPA, ACC joined us to present, “Initiating Intersectional Inclusion Using the Wheel of Identities.” With Ms Wilson’s facilitation, participants explored nuances of intersectionality and privilege in addition to tools to create and sustain meaningful inclusion in their spheres of influence.

To close the day, attendees broke out for the Innovations Showcase sessions, concurrent presentations that featured a range of topics ranging from improving specialty respect to partnership models aimed to build research capacity in primary care.

On the last day of the 2024 ADFM Annual Conference, we opened with a short session, “Trends and Updates in the Discipline.” Lauren Hughes, MD, MPH, MSc, MHCDS, FAAFP, Co-Chair for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Standing Committee on Primary Care, provided an overview of the work the Standing Committee will be doing to inform the federal Initiative to Strengthen Primary Care. Warren Newton, MD, MPH, President of the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) presented data on competency-based board eligibility as well as information collected through various surveys of family physicians demonstrating some of the challenges facing the discipline like burnout and gender pay disparity. Wayne Altman, MD, Chair of the ADFM Advocacy Committee, also presented about the current work of that committee.

Next, Dr Hughes returned to the stage with her colleague Kyle Leggott, MD for “Translating Evidence into Policy and Practice Change: Ensuring Your Research and Knowledge Generate Impact.” In this interactive workshop, Drs Hughes and Leggott first spoke about policy and advocacy in academic family medicine and then had participants break into small groups to participate in a policy mapping exercise, giving them the chance to brainstorm together how to most effectively advocate for change to different audiences.

The final session for the 2024 Conference was a panel discussion, “What We Learned from COVID Across the Tripartite Department Mission Areas: A Reflection Panel,” featuring Melanie Steiner, PhD, Christine Alexander-Rager, MD, and Lindsay Nagatani-Short, a MD/MPH Candidate at the Keck School of Medicine at USC. The panel, facilitated by Kola Okuyemi, MD, MPH, began with presentations by each panelist, highlighting either an initiative started or lesson learned from responding COVID-19 pandemic that they have adopted as an ongoing practice. The panel then engaged in a lively conversation and answered audience questions, discussing how departments can embrace innovative practices from their own pandemic response in research, clinical practice, and education as our country and the discipline continues to grapple with the effects of the pandemic.

The 2024 ADFM Annual Conference closed with the welcoming of our new ADFM President, Jehni Robinson, MD, FAAFP from The Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. We look forward to convening again for the 2025 Annual Conference, February 17-21, 2025 in Nashville, TN!

• © 2024 Annals of Family Medicine, Inc.