Eve Kellner, DO
Psychiatry, Westchester Medical Center

CIR provides residents and fellows at our hospital with the support that they need in order to better be able to help people, which is why many of us decided to go into medicine in the first place. CIR helps to level the playing field in the ever evolving, complex medical and health system. CIR is currently negotiating a contract for residents and fellows at WMC, and that has been a great learning process for me.

CIR has taught me that I have a voice, and that even when other hospital staff around me say “This is the way we have always done it,” or “I tried and it didn’t work, so you would be wasting your time,” that it is always worth the time and effort to try to improve things for your patients, co-workers, and clients.

The most important thing we can do as an organization is to grow and to keep doing what we are doing. There are so many crucial issues and causes that CIR is involved with (Income Inequality, LGBT Acceptance, Women in Medicine, International Aid, ect.) and I would like to help get more residents and fellows aware of and involved in these issues.

Joining the fight for a living wage encompasses many of our core values. I will help organize residents and fellows to attend the rallies and provide support to the low wage workers across the nation. We need to help empower the working poor and raise the minimum wage so that the gross inequality that has so many Americans choosing between life essentials like shelter, food, education and medical care can start to be corrected.

The work I have done and will continue to do with Women in Medicine, will help to enable residents and fellows to make sure that they are recognized for their work and help to decrease the wage gap in medicine and across other career paths.

I would like to become more involved in LBGT advocacy. During medical school, I had the amazing opportunity to live with a family and their transgender child while I rotated with a plastic surgeon who performed gender reassignment surgery. It became very clear to me that the general public, and surprisingly the medical field, have not yet had enough education to respectfully treat some if not all of the groups denoted by the acronym, LBGT.