Northeast Florida Medicine
Vol. 66, No. 1 2015
7
From the President’s Desk
Raed Assar, MD, MBA
2015 DCMS President
First, I would like to thank the Duval County Medical
Society (DCMS) community and the outgoing DCMS
President, Dr. Mobeen Rathore, for the opportunity to
serve as your President
in 2015.This is truly an
honor and I will treat
it as such.
After guidance from
many of you, we have
embarked on an initia-
tive to help ourmedical
community develop
leaders and to support
our members through
challenges they face in
their careers in medi-
cine. Dr. Steven Cuffe,
Professor of Psychiatry
at UF, and Dr. Uday
Deshmukh, Senior Medical Director from Florida Blue,
have graciously agreed to lead a taskforce to develop a
mentoring program that would also enhance the talent in
our medical community.
TheMentoringTaskforce includesDrs. Cynthia Anderson,
Tra’Chella Johnson-Foy, William Palmer and Ana Alvarez.
The taskforce members met and decided their goal is for
DCMS to be recognized nationally for excellence in training
and nurturing physician leadership in organized medicine.
Over the next few months, DCMS will choose a strategy
to implement such a program and structure it to meet the
needs of our medical community.
This goal naturally supports the mission of DCMS to
“Help physicians care for the health of our community”
because
stronger leaders create a stronger, more impactful society.
Additionally, when we become the engine for physician
leadership, that leadership extends beyond the county to the
FMA, AMA, WMA, and hundreds of national and regional
specialty societies.
The proposedDCMSmentoring programwould involve a
process of matching new and existing DCMS members with
experienced and highly regarded mentors from within our
Society. Many of you have led successful local, regional, or
national responsibilities, in addition to weathering personal
challenges in your careers.
After revealing the early plans for the mentoring initia-
tive, we received an enthusiastic response from many of our
medical community leaders who offered to serve as mentors
in this initiative. Every DCMS member can also serve in
such a role at the level she/he would like to participate. You
may choose to meet with others to talk and compare notes.
Every level of participation can be valuable. Guidance and
camaraderie can address physician burnout, a real threat to
the effectiveness of the medical community, by bringing
back the joy of helping patients.
If you are interested, please send an email our Communi-
cations Coordinator, KristyWolski, at
and she will follow up. Please make sure to include the
needed information below in your email. I encourage you
to participate. I truly believe that you receive most when
you invest time and effort into strengthening your own
community. Please do not hesitate to share your suggestions
and thank you for your support!
v
Update on the Mentoring Initiative
Dr. Assar is Aetna’s Medical Director for North Florida. Articles or opinions provided by Dr. Assar do not necessarily reflect the views of Aetna.
Needed information:
Name ________________________________________________________
Direct Phone Number ________________________________________
Email ________________________________________________________
Please select from the list below the areas of your interest:
1. Career development
2. Performance improvement
3. Medical Legal issues
4. Work-Life balance
5. Health or physician recovery
6. Public relations
7. Other
