Why I am an AGS Member

Educational, Networking, and Leadership Opportunities in Geriatrics Make Membership Invaluable -- Kenneth Brummel-Smith, MD

I joined the AGS in 1980. I had just finished an education fellowship, was in family practice, and was teaching in a family practice residency. I started getting interested in this new area -- geriatrics. I hadn't had any training in it in my residency and hadn't done a fellowship, and I was looking for information. I found that AGS meetings were a great way to get up to speed quickly.

I also found that being a part of AGS provided all sorts of opportunities for extending my network of colleagues and friends. A big benefit of being a member of the AGS is that you meet such a diversity of people -- from the most famous writer or researcher in a particular field to the practitioner in the trenches getting the job done.

A few years after I joined, I started getting involved in AGS' special interest groups. I'd taken a job as director of geriatric rehabilitation programs at Rancho Los Amigos in Los Angeles, the largest rehabilitation hospital in the world, and rehabilitation became an area of interest. When the American Board of Family Practice and American Board of Internal Medicine started thinking about offering a Certificate of Added Qualifications in geriatrics, they asked leaders in various disciplines to recommend people for the test committees. Thanks to the recommendations of Gregg Warshaw and Richard Ham and others I knew through AGS -- my AGS connections -- I was invited to be on the first test committee. It was a great opportunity because I was able to get a lot of questions about rehabilitation into the test and this led a lot of fellowships around the country to pay more attention to rehabilitation.

It was also thanks to AGS contacts that I moved to Oregon Health Sciences University eight years later. After our son was born, my wife, who is also a physician, and I decided to get out of LA, which was too hectic. We were looking for a place with a geriatrics program, and settled on Portland. Dr. Knight Steel, who I knew through AGS, introduced me to Dr. John Walsh, at the Oregon Health Sciences University, who just happened to have an opening. I taught there for four years and became chief of geriatrics after Dr. Walsh retired.

My experiences with AGS taught me that physicians in healthcare systems have as much visibility as academics, and this influenced subsequent career decisions. In 1994, when a new development called "managed care" was making headlines, I began thinking, "What can it do for geriatrics?" I went to work for a major health system called Providence Health System, which needed a director of its Center on Aging who could look at how to provide geriatrics within a health care system. As a result of my work with health systems, I got involved in the creation of what was at first an AGS special interest group in managed care, but then became the Healthcare Systems Committee.

Over time, I got more involved in AGS, serving 8 years on the board, and then serving as president and chair of the board. I had certain goals during my presidency, including increasing our interdisciplinary membership and increasing the resources we make available to practitioners --who need straightforward, pragmatic information. Being president allowed me to push those agendas.

Anyone can get involved in the AGS. If you have any desire, you can influence what the Society stands for. You just need to get involved. You don't have to have designs on being elected to the board. You can start by joining special interest groups, and then let the leadership know you're interested in committees. Simply by getting involved, you can help drive the agenda.

Kenneth Brummel-Smith, MD, AGS Member, founding chair of the Department of Geriatrics at the Florida State University College of Medicine, Tallahassee, Florida.