G. Gayle Stephens - Keystone Conference Series

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Dr. G. Gayle Stephens (1928-2014)
A founder of family medicine in the United States, Gayle Stephens was a family physician, writer, thinker, teacher and leader whose ideas and convictions have guided the development of family medicine, primary care, and medicine as a profession for decades. He provided consistent intellectual leadership that connected history, philosophy, religion, psychiatry, the family, the community and the sciences to the practice of medicine. He wrote regularly about our successes, our challenges, and our shortcomings. He particularly advanced the importance of relationships in clinical practice and the role of the personal physician as a trusted and trustworthy agent for patients.

"In just 15 years (1966 to 1981), family practice, in the words of Gayle Stephens, evolved from a highly debatable abstraction to the third largest graduate medical education enterprise in the United States... The history of family practice has been chronicled by many writers, notably John Geyman and Robert Taylor, but the clearest description of the theoretical basis of the new specialty belongs to Gayle Stephens. Always a humble man from Kansas who counted his blessings as a witness to history, Gayle became the towering voice for family practice as a reform specialty within medicine."—Joseph E. Scherger, M.D., MPH

Keystone Conferences
In 1984, Gayle decided to pull together some personal friends and others from diverse backgrounds to engage in the first public reexamination of the political and intellectual origins and development of family medicine as a discipline since its founding in 1969. He did this under the sponsorship of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine. He held it in Keystone, Colorado, near his family's mountain home. Those who attended, paid their way. This event inspired two subsequent "Keystone Conferences" that Gayle helped organize... the last was in 2000, called Keystone III, and was the stimulus for the Future of Family Medicine project and its continuing offspring today.

An invitational conference planned for June 5–7, 2015 will be the first conference in this newly established series and the fourth Keystone conference. It will focus on what promises personal physicians in the United States are prepared to make as to when and where they will be there for their patients. Several large group sessions will be streamed live… stay tuned for log-in information.