ACOFP: OUR CONTINUING HISTORY 97 Leadership INTERNATIONAL PRIMARY CARE EDUCATIONAL ALLIANCE (IPCEA) The concept of IPCEA was born out of an approach in 2006 by the American Osteopathic Foundation (AOF) and Heart to Heart International (HHI), a global humanitarian organization, to investigate opportunities for DOs who wanted to volunteer for humanitarian efforts domestically and internationally. This was led by Royce Keilers, DO, FACOFP dist., a previous member of the AOF Board of Directors and past ACOFP president, who traveled to the Sichuan Province with HHI to learn more about their health care training efforts in the province. Later, HHI invited Chinese educators from the Sichuan Province to the United States to observe and consult with American osteopathic physicians about how to retrain specialists as generalists. In May 2007, an AOF team consisting of six primary members traveled to Chengdu to share how osteopathic family physicians are trained, to learn more about the Chinese health care system, and to identify opportunities for partnership. The group included Dr. Keilers (chair); Teresa Hubka, DO, FACOOG; Steve Downey, former AOF Executive Director; Kenneth J. Veit, DO, MBA, FACOFP; William J. Burke, DO, FACOFP dist.; and Ronnie B. Martin, DO, FACOFP dist. With the added support of the ACOFP Foundation and Welch-Allyn, the IPCEA project included delegations of osteopathic family physicians traveling to areas such as Chengdu, Nanjing, Nanchong, Leshan, Luzhou, Shenzhen, Guang’an, and Yibin to provide didactic medical education, teaching skills, and management of acute and chronic disease from a family medicine osteopathic holistic viewpoint. Prior to IPCEA, China offered few primary care medicine service programs. Additionally, IPCEA and the Shenzhen Continuing Medical Education Center developed four train-the-trainer family medicine programs for Chinese physician participants, who finished the programs with a written exam, an OSCE, and a formal graduation ceremony. They, in turn, have gone on to train hundreds of family medicine physicians and have become leaders in their community health centers and hospitals. THE NATURAL AND PERSONAL DISASTER FUND This fund was developed to assist in resupplying office practices or helping provide financial support when an ACOFP member encounters a natural or personal disaster (e.g., hurricane, tornado, flood, fire), so they can quickly return to caring for their patients and communities. The fund also covers circumstances such as the relocation of a family medicine resident to another osteopathic family medicine residency program when their’s has unexpectedly closed.
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