At its July meeting in Washington, D.C., the APA Board of Trustees endorsed a pilot project that will provide 14 allied psychiatric organizations with greater opportunities to influence APA policy in their area of expertise. Each of these organizations can request to have a representative serve as a voting member of a relevant APA committee or council and would be responsible for paying travel expenses for that representative to attend meetings of that component. The APA president will make the final appointment from among the names submitted by each organization. The project was to begin in late July and conclude next May at the end of APA’s 2001 annual meeting.

The Board agreed to survey all APA voting members to obtain their input on several proposals to change the APA election process. Trustees decided that sending an all-member questionnaire is preferable to the original proposal, which was to survey a stratified random sample of four member categories—members-in-training, early career psychiatrists, mid-career psychiatrists, and lifers or retired members.

In other actions, the Board voted to

• Back the establishment of an APA division that would concentrate on "minority, national, and children’s programs." The Board directed the Finance and Budget Committee and APA staff to "consider this priority" as they develop the 2001 budget. The Trustees’ action on the new division arose from the recommendation of an ad hoc task force that was charged with identifying a fitting memorial for former APA Deputy Medical Director Jeanne Spurlock, M.D.

Spurlock, who died in November at age 78, spent 25 years as head of APA’s Division of Education, Minority, and National Programs and was an outspoken advocate for the often-overlooked mental health concerns of minorities, women, and children. Programs that address these issues are currently housed in the APA Division of Education and Minority and National Programs headed by Deputy Medical Director James Thompson, M.D.

• Endorse a two-year pilot project for recruiting new APA members and retaining current ones. A major feature of the recruitment program, which applies to psychiatrists who were not members in 1999 or 2000, would provide new members with a certificate valued at between $50 and $250 that they can apply to the purchase of APA products or APPI books and journals. The amount would depend on the level of national dues the new member pays, and the certificate would be sent when the member has paid 2001 dues in full.

As an incentive to current members, APA will send them, once they pay their 2001 dues, discount coupons that they can use toward purchases of APA or APPI products providing their order totals at least $200.

• Approve a recommendation from the Joint Commission on Government Relations that APA should continue to make the introduction of Medicare prescription drug coverage that does not discriminate against medications for psychiatric illnesses a high priority in its advocacy efforts with the federal government.

• Provide the Texas and Georgia district branches and the California and New York state psychiatric societies with grants ranging from $20,000 to $40,000 to support public education programs focusing on the "expansion of nonphysician scope-of-practice authority" in their states.

• Support efforts of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) to investigate charges that the Chinese government is engaged in "abuse and misuse" of psychiatry in its crackdown on "practitioners" in the organization known as Falun Gong. The Board also referred this matter to the APA Commission on International Psychiatry and the Committee on Misuse and Abuse of Psychiatry for monitoring the progress of the WPA’s investigation

• Approved a practice guideline for the treatment of patients with HIV and AIDS. This latest addition to APA’s practice guideline series will be described in the next issue of Psychiatric News.

• Refer issues relating to APA’s stance on carveouts to two components, the Council on Psychiatric Services and the Committee on Universal Access to Health Care, for further review. This was in response to an Assembly action paper calling on APA to adopt a policy that it would advocate against mental health carveouts. Several Board members were concerned that while many carveouts are a hindrance to optimal psychiatric care, a blanket condemnation was too extreme. For many patients, especially in the public sector, the alternative to carveouts is no care at all, they pointed out.

• Adopt as official APA policy support of legislation designed to improve patients’ access to "affordable psychiatric medications."