Be on the lookout!

Psychiatrists will have a chance later this month to help increase APA's representation in the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association.

Psychiatrists who are members of the American Medical Association will be receiving a ballot in the mail to be used for the purpose of designating one specialty organization to represent them on the floor of the AMA House of Delegates.

APA members are strongly urged to use this opportunity to vote for APA as their representative.

APA Medical Director Melvin Sabshin, M.D., requests every member who receives an AMA ballot to check the box labeled "American Psychiatric Association" and send the completed ballot back to the AMA.

"It is critical to our efforts at representing the needs of the mentally ill in the house of medicine that there be a 100 percent response," Sabshin said.

For every 2,000 votes received, APA will get an additional delegate to the House of Delegates, according to APA's Division of Government Relations.

The ballot will be mailed the week of October 14, with a return deadline of no later than December 20.

Further details, and an additional reminder, will appear in the next issue of Psychiatric News.

Members will also be afforded the opportunity to select a society via a toll-free telephone number; that number will be included on the ballot.

The vote is part of a restructuring of AMA's House of Delegates designed to give a greater voice to specialty societies.

Traditionally, the governing body of the AMA has largely been in the hands of the state medical societies.

The move toward reorganization, first approved at the House of Delegates meeting in December 1995, stems from concerns on the part of many in AMA that the organization is losing members

(Psychiatric News, January 19).

At that meeting, the "Report on the Study of the Federation" was presented to the House of Delegates, offering a vision for a significant overhaul of the way the "house of medicine" is organized.

The report was presented by the Consortium for the Study of the Federation, of which psychiatrists Judy Linger, M.D., and Clifford Moy, M.D., were members.

Moy, who is clinical director at Austin State Hospital, told Psychiatric News after the December meeting that the impetus to reorganize has been driven by the perception that organized medicine is no longer attracting and serving the interests of the individual physician.

Moy told Psychiatric News that the work of the consortium, beginning in May 1994, involved focus groups and interviews with state medical society leadership, AMA leaders, and individual physicians.

That research revealed that the current federation structure is no longer attracting physicians whose specific identities—determined by geography, specialty, mode and setting of practice, and several other variables—are being better represented by other groups.

Moy said following the December meeting that greater representation in the House of Delegates will enhance APA's ability to network with other groups with similar interests within the American Medical Association and would increase the AMA's responsiveness to issues that concern psychiatrists.

(Psychiatric News, October 18, 1996)