It has been a wonderful year. We held our 2017 Annual Meeting on Jan. 12, 2017, featuring physician-comedian Brad Nieder, MD, and renowned wellness expert Carla Rotering, MD. Our annual strategic planning meeting was held in March, resulting in three areas of focus: advance care directives, physician wellness, and the opioid epidemic. As we looked at addressing physician wellness, we listened to the membership whom requested less business and more social time. In response to this, we vamped up our social event options and held a wonderful meet and greet event in April at the house of President Donna Sullivan, MD, and hosted our first ever “beer garden” summer social at Budweiser in July.

In focusing on advance care directives, we have been working very closely with Rep. Joann Ginal on her new advance care directive statewide registry bill. We also had a great time partnering with SOCI (Systems of Care Initiative) by sponsoring and attending their “Day at the Ranch” fundraising event in September held to raise awareness of advance care directives and raise money to support free services in northern Colorado. NCMS also awarded them our first ever nonprofit community grant to support advance care directive physician coaching services in northern Colorado.

We were thrilled to attend the Colorado Medical Society’s annual meeting held Sept. 15-17 in Breckenridge and in October continued our annual Legislative Night tradition. As many know, the opioid topic is gaining momentum and we have addressed this by adding this to the agenda for every board meeting held in 2017. We plan to implement an action plan for 2018 and look forward to working more with our membership as well as the community on this initiative.  I hope to see you at our next event which will be the Northern Colorado Medical Society’s 2018 annual meeting.  This is sure to be a night of fun.

Maria Medina, EdD