Nevada Chapter College Awards
2025 Chapter Excellence Award-Silver Level Winner
(September 2025) We are pleased to announce that our chapter is in receipt of the Silver Level of the 2025 Chapter Excellence Award! This year 12 chapters received the Silver Award. The award recognizes chapters that achieve excellence in chapter management. In order to achieve the Chapter Excellence Award, chapters must meet 22 Bronze criteria and 12 Silver criteria. Criteria include such activities as undertaking efforts to increase advocacy efforts, collaborating with stakeholders to increase visibility of the ACP, holding competitions for members, providing chapter financial reports to members, having Medical Student and Resident/Fellow members on the Governor's Advisory council, retaining transitional and unpaid members, giving awards to chapter members. I would like to extend a special thanks to those chapter members who assisted us in all of these endeavors! For their hard work and dedication, we received this award.
Nevada Chapter Receives Two 2025 John Tooker Evergreen Awards
The John Tooker Evergreen Awards Program provides recognition and visibility to chapters that have successfully implemented programs to increase membership, improve communication, encourage member involvement, enhance diversity, foster careers in internal medicine or improve chapter management. The Nevada Chapter received two 2025 John Tooker Evergreen Award for their initiatives, Great Debates in collaboration with the Arizona Chapter and Medical Education Community Faculty Development Program.
Great Debates
Residency participants commented that they may incorporate this type of learning activity in their own residencies thanks to ACP.
The ACP Great Debates takes controversial topics in medicine and allows residency teams to debate these topics with the goal of better understanding the duality of medicine. The tournament is composed of preliminary rounds of residency competitions/events at various state locations, culminating in a championship between finalists. The interstate Great Debates 'Executive Committee' worked together to create rules, judging criteria, and debate topics. Each state's Great Debates Committee ran the logistics of their chapter's events. Topics were assigned at random to each competing teams who were then given 30 days to prepare. Events were judged by a panel of volunteer judges and fellow residents. Medical students, faculty, and other ACP members were invited to attend in person or via Zoom to learn about controversial topics in medicine.
Special thanks to this program’s key contributors:
Allan Markus, MD, FACP, Arizona Chapter, Governor
Sandhya Wahi-Gururaj, MD, PhD, FACP, Nevada Chapter, Governor
Sujatha Reddy, MD, Arizona Chapter, Committee Chair
Ashini Shah, MBBS, FACP, Arizona Chapter, Committee Vice-Chair
Sheraz Faizan, MBBS, Nevada Chapter, Committee Member
Charles Danish, Nevada Chapter, Committee Member
Medical Education Community Faculty Development Program
We had 90 unique registrants to the series thus far. Non-IM attendee specialties included surgical specialties, ob/gyn, pediatrics, neurology, PM&R, and basic science faculty.
Over the past decade, significant growth in graduate medical education at community-based/university-affiliated programs occurred due to physician shortages, predominantly in southern Nevada. While expansion was necessary, it resulted in a strain on available resources since there were few local opportunities for structured faculty development and a shortage of experts in medical education in the greater Las Vegas area. In 2020, the Nevada Chapter developed a high-quality faculty development series to support community faculty in their new roles. This series was created to support faculty while serving the needs of GME programs. Our goal was to provide value for our members.
Special thanks to this program’s key contributors:
Sandhya Wahi-Gururaj, MD, PhD, FACP, Nevada Chapter, Governor