TY - JOUR T1 - Advocacy efforts in trauma and acute care surgery: learning to walk JF - Trauma Surgery & Acute Care Open DO - 10.1136/tsaco-2017-000077 VL - 2 IS - 1 SP - e000077 AU - Lewis J Kaplan AU - Erik Barquist AU - Donald Jenkins AU - Orlando Kirton Y1 - 2017/03/01 UR - http://tsaco.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000077.abstract N2 - In modern American politics, advocacy is a focused and dynamically charged process. Despite the intense interplay in Washington, DC, advocacy efforts and activities remain more opaque for the majority of frontline healthcare providers. Advocacy efforts are not generally considered an essential element of daily practice. Instead, many providers may derive comfort from the belief that someone else will have the knowledge, desire, commitment, and time to speak and act on their behalf. Each of us are faced with challenges on a daily basis that relate to market, resource, access, or finance issues—all of which are reasonable advocacy targets.1 Limited engagement in advocacy by surgical care providers as a group is perhaps an indicator of disinterest, discomfort, or perhaps even apathy among members concerning advocacy and its impact on preserving current or garnering additional resources critical to our profession. While patient care activities must remain firmly planted at the pinnacle of our charge, one approach to consider is that advocacy efforts targeted at clearly defined aspects of care should be considered a professional activity, and given equal footing with administration, academic productivity, and teaching.2 While there may be knowledge deficits regarding advocacy, there appears to also be the concept that advocacy is ‘someone else's’ job.It is important to learn from previous advocacy efforts that involved the trauma community. The Roundtable for Critical Care assembled a multiprofessional group of individuals and partnered them with a bipartisan, experienced advocacy team that led to actionable legislation and a critical care relevant bill put before Congress: the Critical Care Assessment and Improvement Act of 2014. This bill was in keeping with the Roundtable's tripartite focus of advanced care and ethics, innovation and outcomes, and disaster preparedness. This paradigm—partnering local and national expertise with professional advocacy experts—merits further exploration. One method of starting … ER -