Family Medicine Week Raises Awareness of the Need for More Investments in Primary Care

We are coming off a busy and energizing week here in Michigan. March 19-25 was Michigan Family Medicine Week, an annual campaign designed to spotlight the family medicine specialty's role in keeping families and individuals of all ages healthy, helping patients manage chronic conditions, and reducing the need for unnecessary hospitalizations and emergency room visits, thus lowering healthcare costs.

Michigan Academy of Family Physicians designates Family Medicine Week each year as the week following the Main Residency Match and encompassing our Advocacy Day; this generates tremendous engagement, exposure, and momentum

The Michigan Family Medicine Week 2023 message: everyone needs a primary care physician as their usual/regular source of primary and preventive care, yet barriers exist that prevent that from being reality. Investments in primary care and the primary care workforce are needed to increase access to care and to more evenly distribute family physicians across health professional shortage areas of the state.

Below is a summary of the success of Michigan Family Medicine Week 2023:

• Gov. Whitmer issued a formal proclamation to recognized the contributions of family physicians
• The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services sent a statewide media release to recognize the value of family medicine
• MAFP hosted a virtual media roundtable on March 20, to discuss the worsening primary care physician shortage, citing the new Milbank Foundation/Robert Graham Center report released in February, and offer several key strategies for turning the tide on the shortage
• Journalists/reporters from 15 media outlets attended the roundtable via Zoom, providing tremendous coverage that reached more than 12.6 million viewers/readers/listeners
• MAFP shipped a "celebration in a box" to the Family Medicine Interest Groups at our state's medical schools; included were give aways and a social media toolkit for amplifying the Family Medicine Week message
• Data presented at the media roundtable served as the basis for social media posts throughout the week; search #MiFamMedWeek, #MiFamilyDocs, and #MakeMIHealthy on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn