ACR 2023 YPS Recap

We had excellent programming for our annual Young and Early Career Professional Section (YPS) meeting, with strong participation and positive feedback. The program opened with a session by Dr. Adam Kaye, providing a RADPAC^® update demonstrating the political action committee’s accomplishments and ongoing efforts, with information about how we can all meaningfully contribute to strengthening the future of our profession through both financial support and easily responding to legislative calls to action. This was followed by our YPS caucus where we reviewed and discussed the resolutions that were presented for YPS endorsement. 

Dr. Cheri Canon of the Radiology Leadership Institute^® (RLI) was gracious enough to present a lecture on leadership, offering her insights on establishing credibility with leadership positions in our early careers. She provided valuable advice that the audience could both reflect on and put to use as she described her own challenges in ascending various leadership positions, as well as the challenges she continues to observe in other young leaders going through the same process.

Dr. Monica Wood, newly elected Vice Chair of the YPS Executive Committee, then presented a lecture on the nuts and bolts of policy at the American College of Radiology^® (ACR^®). This was a detailed review of how policy is written, reviewed, submitted and how it navigates its way through the Council. In addition, parliamentary motions, prioritization and strategy were discussed, to help us understand what to say and when, in order to achieve our aims with supporting, amending or defeating resolutions during Council.

In our final session, we had the opportunity to put all of this into practice — to reinforce what we learned, by actively taking a mock resolution establishing a recommended RVU limit through the entire process. Dr. Wood, who previously served as a member of the ACR Council Steering Committee as Chair of the ACR Resident and Fellow Section (RFS) and long-term delegate in the American Medical Association House of Delegates and Massachusetts Medical Society House of Delegates, acted as speaker.

Dr. Wood was supported by a panel composed of the following individuals:

• Dr. Jason Itri, a content expert on quality and safety, with prior roles as Vice Chair of Quality, Vice Chair of Operations, and Director of Peer Review and Physician Performance.
• Tom Hoffman, Vice President of Legal at the ACR, with expertise on corporate matters, including governance, and regulatory and transactional matters.
• Dr. Adam Kaye, YPS RADPAC liaison and councilor for Connecticut.
• Dr. Natasha Monga, Immediate Past Chair of the ACR RFS and member of the Council Steering Committee.
• Dr. McKinley Glover, former Chair of the ACR RFS, Speaker of the AMA RFS and Vice Speaker of the Massachusetts Medical Society.

This panel guided us through an interactive process with the audience by taking a mock resolution through a caucus session where we actively discussed the potential implications in small groups. Dr. Wood then guided us through a mock reference committee open hearing where testimony was given. 

Finally, Dr. Wood continued her role as Speaker for a mock Council session, where we actively observed how to properly address the Speaker and Council, and how to evaluate a resolution, revise it, and use parliamentary strategy to amend, defend, attack, divide, and refer, among other strategic moves. I am tremendously grateful to all of our presenters for making this possible and providing one of the most robust and useful programs for participating in the ACR annual meeting.