Your APA Board Is Doubling Its Efforts

By Harold I. Eist, M.D.
APA President

By Harold I. Eist, M.D.
APA President

The Board is responsible for setting APA policy and assuring that it is carried out. The Board is responsible to you, the members, and you need to know what we are doing.

Most, if not all, of us on the Board have served this organization at many levels and in many ways before becoming Board members. For example, I have worked at the district branch level and the national level for 30 years.

The Board, as currently constituted, is a representative body, giving voice to virtually every constituency in our diverse organization. The fact that we represent multiple perspectives and often have heated debates about key issues of concern to the membership does not mean that every orientation makes its way into our policies. What it means is that broad consideration goes into the development of our policies and differences are respected.

The president determines the dates and frequency of Board meetings. Ordinarily, the Board has four working meetings annually—in June, September, December, and March, each lasting one and a half days—and a ceremonial "changeover" meeting at the annual meeting in May, which lasts a few hours. The agendas of the regular Board meetings are packed, and Board members have the responsibility of going through huge volumes of paper.

Recognizing the major crises in care confronting the mentally ill of America, the devastation of our teaching and research institutions, and the attack on privacy and confidentiality and the doctor-patient relationship, I realized that we could not continue business as usual, although "business as usual" was and is arduous and demanding. The Board works extremely hard but simply could not, in four one-and-a-half-day meetings, come up with the plans and actions necessary to confront, contain, and control the forces currently assailing proper treatment and proper professionalism. We barely had time to oversee the operations of the organization, let alone deal with those issues pushing us perilously close to destruction.

In response to a clear, desperate, clamorous need, I doubled the number of Board meetings from four to eight and, if necessary, will conduct other than ceremonial business at the May meeting. Further, the regular Board meetings will be two full days, the special Board meetings one day; in these special meetings, we will focus primarily on our action initiatives for this year. The action initiatives, which were brainstormed and extensively discussed at the special July Board meeting, include managed care, legislation and litigation, confidentiality and ethics, strategic alliances and corporate education, medical education and research, and the AMA. We are now proceeding forcefully on all of these action initiatives.

Our Board is taking the lead, and our leaders are giving generously of their time and making additional sacrifices as we face current crises. We expect every member to join us in our efforts to turn back those who would dismantle health care for a profit. We cannot and will not submit to what some have cravenly called the "wave of the future." Our struggle against the so-called invincible money powers is the crucible out of which freedom is born and nurtured. We are not strangers to these struggles in America. We know we will lose democracy if we cease to fight for it.

I remind the prognosticators, who continue to insist that those profiteers attacking the well-being of our people are here to stay, of Voltaire's words: "Doubt is not a pleasant state, but certainty is a ridiculous one."

You can rest assured that your Board understands and shares your values, worries, and concerns and will not fiddle while Rome burns.

(Psychiatric News, October 18, 1996)