Adam Cohen, MD
Children’s National Medical Center
Regional VP New Jersey/DC

CIR has contributed to many improvements at our hospital with the most important being bargaining for a new contract this past year. We successfully bargained for many improvements that directly affected our residency program and the way we provide patient care, including replacing resident laptops and improvements to ancillary staffing and services. However, the most exciting thing I have seen from CIR is our participation in the national policy agenda, including most recently in the March for Science.

The most important lesson I’ve learned from my time at CIR is that persistence pays off. No one can ignore a problem forever. Most of the improvement efforts for residency programs, hospitals, or even the national agenda comes down to having people make the effort to push for that change.

I would like to help CIR improve by bolstering the connection between different programs, especially in the more geographically isolated areas. The best way to affect change on a policy scope is to give strong showings to different local and state legislatures and by creating a more strongly linked community and utilizing social media, we can increase CIR’s voice in policy changes for both medical trainees and the medical community overall.

The first step in empowering our members is bringing them together. In the bargaining world as well as politics, strength can be shown in numbers. In order to strengthen each individual hospital and region, we need to bring us all together to support our efforts throughout the country.