Medical student advocacy does not need to be confined to one season of training. Still, making healthcare policy work part of a busy medical school experience requires planning.
During a recent session at the AMA Advocacy in Action Workshop—an annual event that equips medical students with the skills and knowledge to become leaders in medicine—a panel of residents and young physicians shared a practical playbook for making advocacy accessible, meaningful and adaptable across all four years of medical school.
Here are some key takeaways for medical students.
Showing up goes a long way
Your first step as a medical student advocate is showing up.
Now an emergency physician, Christopher Libby, MD, MPH, got started in advocacy work by attending an AMA Interim Meeting in the Washington, D.C., area. He knew very little about the organization’s work and was in part motivated by a free trip to the nation’s capital. Once he arrived at the meeting, “I was hooked,” Dr. Libby said.
Dr. Libby added that the first step doesn’t have to be something as ambitious as a national meeting or event. For many medical students, state and local opportunities may be an easier entry point.
“You can just show up, see what it's all about, maybe you find your people, maybe you find out it's not quite for you and you just want to support the people who come and do it,” said Dr. Libby, delegate for the AMA Young Physicians Section (AMA-YPS). “But you won't know until you go and just give it a shot and there's really no pressure.”
Enthusiasm is a good entry point
For medical students, interest, curiosity and a willingness to say yes can be enough to open the door to a wide range of healthcare advocacy opportunities.
When he was a fourth-year medical student, Daniel Udrea, MD, made a New Year’s resolution to say yes to new experiences. Then a mentor encouraged him to learn about organized medicine, so he took action. A month after that conversation, he was in Chicago for the AMA Annual Meeting.
Attending that first meeting "really did shape everything that led in my future,” said Dr. Udrea, chair-elect of the AMA-YPS Governing Council. “I did more and more advocacy by going to these events, participating, finding legislative advocacy days in whatever state I was in.”
For medical students who are even a little curious, his advice was straightforward.
“Jump in and try it and you’ll meet other people and one thing leads to another,” said Dr. Udrea, who is an emergency medicine and anesthesia critical care physician and assistant professor in Indiana.
For medical students looking to turn their passions into health policy, the AMA offers the chance to connect with nearly 53,000 AMA student members, get hands-on experience advocating for change at the state and federal levels through trainings, meetings and events in Washington, D.C.—and online.
There are plenty of gaps to fill
Not every advocacy path begins with joining an established effort. Sometimes it starts with noticing a gap, deciding it matters and creating something new.
That was true for AMA member Abbigayle Willgruber, MD, whose early advocacy work took shape when she realized her regional medical school did not have an AMA medical student chapter. She decided to create one after realizing she needed a venue to host a state representative who wanted to speak with medical students.
“We built the club and people gravitated towards it,” said Dr. Willgruber, the vice chair of the AMA Resident and Fellow Section (AMA-RFS) Governing Council.
From that first event, she found a group of like-minded medical students and got more involved in organized medicine in the coming years.
“If you are open, welcoming, inviting and passionate about what interests you—whether that’s women’s health, medical education or anything in between—you will create a space to share that,” said Dr. Willgruber, a family medicine resident in Wisconsin. “People who care about those same things will find you.”
Advocacy work can fit a busy schedule
Making an impact as a medical student advocate doesn’t have to be a major time commitment, according to Daniel Resnick, DO, MBA.
“There are lots of ways to get involved that are really not that impactful on your time” said Dr. Resnick, who is vice speaker of the AMA-RFS Governing Council. “Joining a committee, being able to say: Can you offer one hour every three months? Or if you want to get on an active committee, maybe an hour every month, and that's already an impactful thing that makes a huge difference to your community.”
You can build skills gradually
Like many parts of medical training, advocacy skills can develop over time.
Dr. Willgruber said collaboration played a major role in that growth. Getting this work done “requires a lot of teamwork, collaboration, people coming together with different ideas and backgrounds and pulling all of those things together to make things happen,” she said.
A gradual approach can make advocacy feel more realistic for students who may not yet know how to testify, draft a resolution or organize an event, Dr. Libby added.
“If you don't know what you're doing, that's OK,” he said. “It took me several [AMA] meetings to figure out what's going on.”
Passion keeps you going
One of the pros of advocacy is that you can step away from it when the demands of medical school prove to be highest and easily resume your work when it better suits your schedule, the panelists said. That having been said, if you love this type of work, it’s easier to stick with.
Advocacy work “has to be something that adds to your balance, not takes away,” said Dr. Resnick, a psychiatry resident in California. “This can't just be: Oh, I need to do one more thing for my CV or one more thing on top of studying and on top of passing tests and on top of my notes.
“It has to be something that actually adds value to you personally.”
