Membership and Region Chair's Message
December 2011 Newsletter Article
Value: What is the equation for APA members?
Happy holidays! Greetings from sunny and warm Denver where we are decorating outside in t-shirts while the skiing slowly improves in the mountains.
The past few months we have been reviewing the data from the survey that many of you completed earlier this year, and much of the discussion related to membership at and after our strategic planning retreat has been focused on maintaining and enhancing the value of membership. The well-used health services equation, "value=quality/cost", seems to apply here as well as anywhere. We have many different constituencies in the APA, for which the variables in this equation are different: inpatient, outpatient, and emergency clinicians; early, mid-career, and established faculty; and generalists and "generalist subspecialties". Far too many ideas to enhance each side of the value equation were discussed to describe here, but we've been considering the needs of each constituency. Look for specifics in the months to come.
While we were concentrating on this, we quietly passed a much sought-after milestone for the APA. Remember about 12 years ago, when Mort Wasserman, Membership/Regions Chair, coined the "2000 members by 2000" slogan? Well, last month we did it! In fact, as of this writing our membership stands at 2026, so we can safely claim "2011 by 2011". Patience pays off, and thank you! Dave Jaffe, President-Elect, waxes rhapsodic on this historic milestone elsewhere in this newsletter; it's well worth a read!
Region Chairs have been busy planning regional meetings for this academic year. Acknowledging the increasing cost of attending in-person meetings, usually greater than the cost of membership itself, several innovations have emerged! Two pilot projects stand out, not surprisingly being undertaken by regions in the great "breadbasket of North America": one is to have one or several web-based meetings as an alternative to an in-person meeting, and another is to have a web-connected meeting where members travel to one of two video-linked sites by car, eliminating the need for air travel and hotel while preserving the value of meeting colleagues face-to-face. Other new activities include conference calls on specific educational topics, and recognizing the work of emerging scholars at region meetings by having a poster session dedicated to student and resident projects.
Hope to see you in Boston in May!
Christopher Stille
Membership/Regions Chair
Academic Pediatric Association
Christopher.Stille@childrenscolorado.org
