NJ-ACEP Educates State Legislators

Beverly Lynch, executive director of the New Jersey College of Emergency Physicians (NJ-ACEP), has applied for and received two ACEP State Public Policy Grants on behalf of her chapter. Ms. Lynch, whose contract association management firm manages multiple health care associations, commends ACEP for its efforts to help state chapters.

“ACEP does this better than any other medical specialty I’ve had the privilege to work with. They totally get the fact that things happen at the state level—various projects and initiatives bubble up from the states, and ACEP is more than willing to help state chapters fund these initiatives and ideas,” she said. “They really put their money where their mouth is.”

While both of NJ-ACEP’s grants were used to benefit projects that were already under way, Ms. Lynch said the additional funding gave both the extra edge they needed to truly make a difference at the state level.

One previous project, a mini-internship program for legislators, health care press, and anyone else impacting health care legislation in New Jersey, was “wildly successful” years before, but proved a logistical nightmare when it came to coordinating schedules and other similar activities. When Ms. Lynch heard about ACEP’s State Public Policy Grant Program in 2007, the New Jersey chapter board members thought the time had come to resurrect the internship program.

“We have so many issues that we need to educate key legislators and other stakeholders about, and what better way to do that than to have them shadow an emergency physician for a few hours?” said Ms. Lynch. “This grant from ACEP allowed us to put new resources into the project to expand it much more so than we were able to do before.”

The chapter used the grant money to launch an extensive mini-internship program, recruiting many policymakers and other key stakeholders in a record amount of time—further deepening their understanding of the challenges that emergency physicians face on a daily basis.

“It’s not a difficult program to administer—it’s just a lot of work, from thousands of e-mails and phone calls, to an introduction letter to an evaluation letter at the end,” said Ms. Lynch. “The ACEP grant even allowed us to order participants white coats, which is a nice touch to make them feel part of the team.”

NJ-ACEP applied for and received another grant in 2008, this time to help the chapter in its efforts to generate support for a legislative package aimed at alleviating the problem of boarding psychiatric patients in the emergency department.