Introduction
Membership in a medical professional organization, or society, is both voluntary and common. Many clinicians belong to more than one such society, especially if they practice critical care medicine. They belong to one or more organizations related to their parent discipline, as well as related to the subspecialty of critical care medicine. Each of the memberships comes at a financial cost. Moreover, membership in a specific society often leads to service for the organization as part of a committee, taskforce, or workgroup. For some, this service paves a path to medical professional organization leadership as well. The latter path is true of two of this chapter’s authors. Recognizing that leadership is much less common than organizational service, it is appropriate to explore what benefits members derive from membership in a medical professional society as part of their regular professional life. Given the pandemic that currently grips the globe, it is equally important to explore the role of medical professional organizations within that context as well.
Medical professional organization types
In general, medical professional organizations exist as six broad types: (1) those related to parent discipline or subspecialty certification (e.g., American Board of Medical Specialties ); (2) those joining or aligning individuals who trained in a specific parent discipline (e.g., American Society of Anesthesiologists ); (3) those joining or aligning individuals who trained in, or practice within, a specific subspecialty or care for a specific patient type [e.g., Society of Critical Care Medicine (SCCM) ]; (4) cross-specialty organizations focused on a specific condition or set of events (e.g., American Red Cross ); (5) nongovernmental organizations that deploy members to locations for disaster relief or to address crisis conditions (e.g., Médecins Sans Frontières ); and (6) governmental organizations that utilize volunteer experts in addition to full- or part-time medical professionals (e.g., Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and World Health Organization ). Each of these organization types serves a function for members and in turn are served by them ( Fig. 1 ).
Member benefits
Since no one is mandated to join a medical professional organization—even if one must utilize the services provided by one such as those comprising the American Board of Medical Specialties—membership must confer benefits perceived to be of value by members. This is particularly true since there is a financial cost to membership that recurs each year. Many members are bereft of a funding stream from their employer to secure membership and therefore pay out of pocket. Multiprofessional organizations embrace members who have widely divergent salary streams. While some have a single membership cost, others, such as SCCM, have developed a tiered membership strategy that supports joining at different price points, albeit with different accompanying benefits. Regardless of membership type or price, members of medical professional organizations enjoy benefits that are common to most such organizations ( Fig. 2 ).
First, members enjoy linkage with other members with similar interests. This commonly occurs at yearly meetings but also occurs within committees for which members may volunteer. Second, committee membership allows members to work with others toward a common goal, augment their experience, expand their curriculum vitae, and learn leadership skills. Third, committee work may also guide one into a leadership role within the committee, further developing a skill set that translates into the member’s workspace as well. Fourth, some multiprofessional organizations have groups comprised of individuals with a similar parent training discipline (i.e., internal medicine as opposed to nursing). Those groups, often termed sections, offer the same parallel opportunities for member’s work, education, skill acquisition, and leadership as does volunteering for the larger organization.
Fifth, members typically receive a medical professional journal (known as the official organ of the society) as well as newsletters and related educational communications. Each of these provide venues for new knowledge transfer, controversy identification and debate, as well as notification of upcoming events. Sixth, in addition to networking opportunities as noted earlier, most organizations host an annual conference, meeting, or congress, that is educationally focused, often reveals cutting edge-research, may teach new skills, or offer review courses to support member professional development in a socially satisfying context. Seventh, many organizations also host a pathway to being recognized as having reached a career milestone. While some utilize a parallel structure termed a “college” within which to house that pathway, the clinician who reaches that milestone earns the designation of “fellow.” In general, there are specific criteria that need to be met, an application is required, and a committee who reviews applicants and submits recommendations to a governing body with whom the ultimate authority rests to confer fellowship. Achieving such status also supports reappointment and more often promotion with the academic community. In this way, highly regarded honors may be achieved during the course of one’s membership. Other awards are often conferred for unique achievement or exceptional service as well.
Eighth, some organizations also partner with others within the same country, providing yet another way for members to participate in, and learn about related organizations besides within the annual meeting. An apt example is the Critical Care Societies Collaborative comprised of the American Association of Critical Care Nurses, the American College of Chest Physicians, the American Thoracic Society, and SCCM. Such groupings also launch joint projects, enable workgroups, and may host their own meetings. In general, participants in such ventures are drawn from the membership of the partnering organizations. Ninth, some medical professional organizations partner with international groups around specific initiatives, events, or clinical conditions. For example, SCCM and the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine has partnered to create the Surviving Sepsis Campaign, whose work is well known in a global fashion. Participation in such related but more free-standing entities is not limited to membership in a parent organization but involved members who share work with experts from other organizations such as the Infectious Diseases Society of America, or the American College of Emergency Physicians, as well as the Japanese Association for Acute Medicine. In summary, a wide array of networking, collaboration, and professional development benefits render the financial cost of membership well valued. These benefits are common across many organizations and are part of one’s professional life and workflow. The recent severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has challenged medical professional organizations to respond in unique ways to support members in their pursuit of quality and timely clinical care. The ability of a given society to do so may hinge on the infrastructure that supports each of the above member benefits.
SARS-CoV-2 and medical professional organizations
As SARS-CoV-2 infection marched across continents, clinicians hungered for information encompassing all aspects of clinical care and public health. Diagnostic elements, infectivity risk, transmission pattern, clinical course, and evaluation of interventions—successful and not—were all highly desired. A country-by-country tally of those infected, recovered, and expired cases has emerged side by side with prediction models. Contact tracing, social distancing, mask wearing, and hand hygiene permeated daily life. Lockdowns, business closures, and household item shortages paralleled personal protective equipment shortages, as well as therapeutic agent shortages, in health-care facilities. As life was put on hold, inquiries from professionals as well as the public blossomed. Social media (SoMe) exploded with myth, fears, tales of success, recounting of failure, and were interspersed with data, ever-changing recommendations, and despairingly little science. It is within this void that medical professional organizations rose to the fore to share information, credible new knowledge, and importantly, education for those who were not members of the organizations at all.
The process by which medical societies adapted to meet member and patients’ needs may be conveniently grouped into nine interwoven domains ( Fig. 3 ). Each of the domains leverage existing infrastructure including staff, technology, subject matter and content experts, as well as leadership within the organization, all of which is distinct from the volunteers to adapt to the imperatives launched by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patient care. Importantly, such changes require a public-facing aspect so that members and nonmembers alike may be engaged in a seamless fashion. That public face is the website and webpage on which one lands when seeking to access content or learn about the organization.
