From the President’s Desk

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What you’ll get from the Leadership Summit

Emily E. Volk, MD

April 2022—The end of this month marks the start of one of my favorite CAP events: the Pathologists Leadership Summit. If you’re not familiar with it or haven’t signed up to attend, I’d like to give you a sense of why it’s so important.

Back in the early 2000s, I attended what was known as CAP Advocacy School. At that point in my career, I had seen many physicians who felt discouraged, frustrated, and helpless about the state of physician payments and government health care regulations, and I understood those feelings. Advocacy School offered a solution. What struck me about this program was the message that we were not powerless. Through this meeting, the CAP taught me that my government representatives would be interested in what I had to say as an expert physician. I was partnered with Richard Hausner, MD, a seasoned pathologist advocate. Through his passion and charisma during our Capitol Hill visits, he showed me and another pathologist also new to advocacy at the time, Patricia Gregg, MD, how to make our voices heard. Dr. Gregg and I were hooked after that Hill Day.

In the mid-2000s, I also got involved in the CAP House of Delegates. I loved the opportunity to network with CAP fellows from across the country and hear the challenges they faced in their practices and how they found solutions.

The CAP Pathologists Leadership Summit combines the best from Advocacy School, the CAP Policy Meeting, and the CAP House of Delegates into an experience that is more than the sum of its parts. At this forum, fellows learn how to frame our concerns in a way that’s concise, effective, and meaningful to congressional staff, health legislative assistants, representatives, and senators. As pathologists, our experiences inform the CAP’s advocacy agenda. Those points of view are honed into powerful messages that resonate with policymakers and governmental leaders. Our CAP advocacy team looks at how those messages fit into the larger context of what’s happening in government and finds ways to align them with other initiatives that already have momentum.

Dr. Volk

The CAP advocacy team has expertise that we pathologists typically do not. They know how the back hall conversations happen on Capitol Hill. Our lobbyists develop long-term relationships with congres-sional staff, building a rapport and trust with the people who most need to hear what we have to say. They also work with our fellows to help them nurture the kind of legislation-changing relationships that have an impact on our daily practice.