Retired UK professor Dr. Ardis Dee Hoven elected first female chair of World Medical Association
Retired University of Kentucky professor Dr. Ardis Dee Hoven, who was the president of the American Medical Association in 2013-14, was elected the first female chair of the World Medical Association at the organization’s 200th council meeting in Oslo, Norway
For the past few years, Hoven was the chair of the AMA’s delegation to the WMA and will now serve as the chair of the WMA for a two-year term. WMA represents physicians from 111 national medical associations.
“I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to do this,” Hoven said in a UK news release. “I see myself not so much as a woman in this role but as a leader of a global organization of physicians who are working to support their peers around the the world and improve the lives of their patients.”
Hoven earned an undergraduate degree in microbiology then a medical degree from UK. She finished her internal medicine and infectious disease training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Now she is a member of the American College of Physicians and the Infectious Disease Society of America.
Hoven has received the University of Kentucky College of Medicine Distinguished Alumnus Award and the Kentucky Medical Association Distinguished Service Award, and in 2015, she was inducted into the Hall of Distinguished Alumni for UK. “Hoven hopes for the WMA to raise its profile internationally and increase the impact of its policies and advocacy on behalf of physicians and patients,” the release says.
“I want to make our footprint bigger and our voice stronger,” Hoven said.
Let us hope that physicians from the more advanced democracies of the world can convince Dr. Hoven that a single payer health care system is more humane– AND more economical– than our broken market-based US system. We spend twice as much as other countries, but have poorer outcomes overall, and we leave millions uninsured. She will have to admit to her World Medical Association colleagues, "In the US, we have good doctors, good hospitals–for those who can afford them."