Page 8 - WCMS1Q22

It’s HOD season once again
It’s House of Delegates time once again. To paraphrase Hemingway’s comment about bankruptcy, it sneaks up slowly and then arrives suddenly. One of the challenges this year is that because last year’s HOD was unavoidably virtual, there is no living memory of it having actually happened, as one would have had there been human- to-human, in-person interaction. Virtual meetings are like artificial reality in that way. They don’t take root or
linger in memory.
Nevertheless, the HOD remains the chief mechan- ism by which issues are brought by the membership to the Board and Executive suite and policy made. It has the disadvantage of occurring only once a year, which in our fast-changing world makes fashioning resolutions problematic, because they fall into the trap of being reactive to things that have already happened rather than proactive, providing guidance for leadership go- ing forward.
Resolutions and Policy
Policy in its most valuable form provides the means
by which decisions are made and actions guided. In the best of circumstances, good policy makes decisions easier to make and enables actions to be carried out more confidently.
In writing resolutions, I don’t think we always see this bigger picture. This disconnect can lead to a hodge-podge of incoherent demands. It is the role of the reference committees (and their MSMS staff) to make decisions in light of the bigger picture. In general, I think they do this well. I also think the decision to have a selection commit- tee filter or cull the draft resolutions, as was done last year, to reduce them to a manageable number and identify those of highest priority was a good one, even though I did not always agree with the decisions.
What to Write Resolutions About
MSMS it seems to me has a dual constituency: while
it has seen its members as its primary customers, it
needs I think more often to see the public as an equally important constituency. (This has been particularly important during the COVID crisis.) This dual constitu- ency is most evident in the topics chosen for HOD reso- lutions by the Medical Student Section of MSMS. Since they are not in practice, students’ resolutions focus not on physician-centric problems, but rather on broad societal problems. Here are the kinds of concerns brought by the medical students to the HOD: prison health care; avail- ability of health care coverage for disadvantaged persons, minorities, and undocumented persons; management of substance abuse disorder; women’s health and health care decisions, not the least of which is the legal availabil- ity abortion.
Writing resolutions is hard. At the most basic level, they need to reflect the intrinsic purposes and roles of a medical society. They must have face validity while advocating for an action or policy position. They need to be understood quickly and easily. They must identify a gap that needs to be filled, or a wrong that needs to be righted, and whatever the proposed action is, it must be within the purview and capability of organized med- icine to achieve. They must be substantiated by logical argument and demonstrable fact. Finally, they must
be defended.
Washtenaw County’s Resolutions for 2022
Elsewhere in the Bulletin you can find the Resolutions being submitted by the Washtenaw County Medical Society or its members, as well as the two resolution•s being submitted by medical students in our county.
8 Washtenaw County Medical Society BULLETIN SPRING 2022