This Year's APA Committee Appointment Process

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

Jeanne Robb, former head of the APA Office to Coordinate Association Governance, referring to component appointments, said to me, "Every president makes 400 friends and 900 enemies."

Jeanne was correct. There are tremendous hard feelings among deserving members who want to serve but, year after year, don't get appointments. There are few things as infuriating as having an offer to help turned down.

Dale Walker, speaker of the Assembly, and I recognize that we cannot honor all requests for appointments, but we also clearly recognize that we cannot afford, in these most difficult times, to estrange, turn off, or turn away members eager to work on behalf of our patients and profession.

We devised the fairest possible appointment process we could think of and cast the widest possible net, involving as many people as we could in the process, from every sector of our diverse discipline. We asked for input from the membership at large; the leadership of the Board and Assembly; district branches; academia, including chairs and directors of residency training; and psychiatric organizations. There were responses from every group polled, with the combined lists in the thousands. We had additional valuable input from Richard Harding, immediate past speaker, and Herb Sacks, president-elect.

We knew we needed to maintain continuity, add fresh new perspectives, and strive for balance of representation. It is important for you to know that the president-elect has only one-fourth to one-fifth of the slots in the components open to fill each year.

At the Fall Leadership Conference last year, Dr. Walker and I met together with the council chairs to get their input and appointment suggestions. Our criteria for reappointment were attendance at meetings, hard work, dedication, special knowledge, and positive contributions, including, but not limited to, active involvement at the district branch level. We opened this process to a wide audience while respecting the need for confidentiality. There was a great deal of give-and-take and information exchanged. It was a dynamic day-long series of meetings, with hundreds of members involved, conducted with unprecedented openness.

Recognizing that some members occupied positions on many components, we wrote to all individuals on more than three components and asked them to select their top three components, so that we could open positions for others.

Finally, because it was imperative that we include every member desiring to work, I suggested to the Assembly Executive Committee that we develop Area Action Committees. I attended one Assembly Planning Committee meeting and one Assembly Executive Committee meeting to discuss this proposal. The Action Committees were to be organized in conformity with our six action initiatives (strategic alliances and corporate education, managed care, legislation and litigation, ethics and confidentiality, medical education and research, and the AMA) and were to focus their efforts in their regions with integration and coordination with national activities.

The Area Action Committees will provide members the opportunity to do professional society work on behalf of patients, meet with colleagues, and enhance their expertise. I believe that service on Area Action Committees should count toward appointment to national components and aid in assuring fair regional distribution in national components. They will also, importantly, provide a perpetual pipeline of willing, effective, experienced workers to ensure the continuous application of our initiatives. After we have won the war, we will need a strong organization to retain the peace through maintaining a resolute and persistent activist stance.

The Area Action Committees will assist also in the depoliticizing, to some extent, of appointments and the appointment process.

Our information systems are currently in their developmental phases, so that I am not able to provide you with the demographics of our APA components. However, we spent hundreds of hours to make the appointments fair and representative. The high enthusiasm, excitement, and morale at this year's component meetings suggest we were successful. Now we need to proceed posthaste with getting the Area Action Committees operational.

(Psychiatric News, October 18, 1996)