Title: APHA Governing Council 2003: Highlights from the Epidemiology Section
Author:
Section/SPIG: Epidemiology
Issue Date:
By Jim Gaudino, MD, MPH, MS
and Marian Passannante, PhD
Epidemiology Section Acting Whip and Whip for 2003 and Epidemiology Section Governing Council Members
Amazingly, another year for the APHA Governing Council ends with the completion of the 131st Annual Meeting in San Francisco in November 2003. With calls in past years for the greater involvement of APHA members’ elected representatives in major organizational decisions, this year marks a new, unprecedented effort to reach out to members with the first-ever teleconference meeting of the APHA’s congress-like Governing Council in September. In this “mid-year” meeting, the Council approved changes to APHA’s budget year and prepared for further discussions about APHA’s draft strategic directions.
Prior to and during the scientific meetings at the annual meeting, APHA’s volunteer leadership in Governing Council again engaged in various discussions of a wide variety of topics about our public health missions and the organization. Active among these leaders were the Epidemiology Section Governing Council members, who represent our section’s members and give voice to members concerns, and three new student “Governing Council shadows” that joined us to observe and get involved in APHA’s governance process.
To further enhance student interest in and provide students real experiences with the Epidemiology Section’s APHA governance work, the Epidemiology Section with the leadership of Linda Hazlett, the Section’s Student Liaison, recruited three epidemiology students as our first “Governing Council shadows.” These students were paired off with Governing Council members and immediately became engaged firsthand in the fast pace duties of the Governing Council members during the Annual Meeting. For all Section Governing Council members, it was truly our pleasure to work with these students: Celestine A. Buyu from the University of Michigan, Jodi P-Juan Clark from the Florida International University, and Arpi Terzian from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
Please take a look at Terzian’s summary of her “shadowing” experiences in a related article in this newsletter. Also, more details about the new Epi Section Governing Council Shadow Program and this year’s shadows are available in the Fall ’03 newsletter posted at <http://www.apha.org/newsletter/>.
The meetings were packed with issues and reports to evaluate, discuss and take action on. These include finalizing and passing 27 new APHA policy resolutions, further refining proposed APHA strategic directions, defining APHA annual policy priorities, and electing several new leaders to the Executive Board and the new APHA President-Elect as well as new members for various committees, such as the APHA Nominating Committee.
In general, this year’s proposed policy resolutions continued to reflect the difficult and important public health challenges of the last several years: trying to balance the collective public health and social justice concerns of APHA members with APHA’s organizational need for political viability among current national policy makers. For example, the 2003 resolutions touched on diverse domestic issues such as calling for improved support for WIC and child nutrition programs, for supporting national environmental health tracking, for the strengthening of the federal assault weapons ban, for ensuring the scientific credibility of government public health advisory committees, and for strengthening the fiscal viability and independence of public health while responding to terrorism. The later policy led to some controversy as some members wondered how best to respond to current federal policies that have led to some improvements in public health’s response abilities. Even so, other members felt strongly that, with these current resources, federal priorities have led to a net reduction in the capacity of the public health system and, in the resolution, expressed concern about the diversion of public health resources and staff for police and other anti-terrorism activities that may end up compromising public health’s mission.
Although fewer in number, internationally relevant resolutions issues stretched from calling for support for sexual and reproductive health and rights in the United States and abroad; strengthening U.S. investments in multilateral programs to address the HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria epidemics in the world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa; and expressing formal opposition to U.S. plans for new nuclear weapons development and pre-emptive wars.
Prior to and during the annual meeting, Epi Section Governing Council members again brought to this year’s iterative policy development processes our critical scientific review and comments and passionate advocating that, as much as possible, each policy be supported by appropriate scientific evidence. To accomplish this, sometimes in the last hours before policy revisions were due, we worked with authors and other Council members on specific language and provided suggestions on what types of evidence were needed.
An overview of the new policies is posted at <http://www.apha.org/news/press/2004/policies.htm>, and a summary of each was published in the December 2003/January 2004 issue of The Nation’s Health. The final versions are posted in the public area of the legislative, advocacy and policy on the APHA Web site at <http://www.apha.org/legislative/policy/>.
For decades, the archive of adopted APHA policies have reflected the heartbeat of public health issues—both issues that remain and new ones that arise. As needed, APHA staff use them to work with national leaders and other policies makers. However, these policies can also be a rich resource for broader use by others in public health. We would encourage our members to become familiar with APHA’s policy archive resource and to share it with the policy makers you interact with.
Also, APHA needs guidance from its membership on both addressing new public health issues as well as staying current on continuing issues. We would like to encourage you as Epidemiology Section members to raise these issues with APHA through the policy development process. The guidance to submit 2004 proposed policy resolutions and statements is already posted in the members only Web area: <http://www.apha.org/private/ppolicy.htm>. New proposals are due Feb. 13, 2004.
In breakout sessions on Sunday, APHA Executive Board members led Governing Councilors through a review and comment session on the most recent draft of new APHA strategic directions “map” resulting from several years of work. Council members had the opportunity to provide further comments on the details under four proposed, overarching APHA objectives. The tension to strive for balance between moving forward on public health work and addressing organizational infrastructure issues is very apparent in these four objectives since two of them address public health and the other two address organizational issues. The Executive Board will collate and try to reflect our comments and concerns in the next draft, which we hope will soon to become available to APHA members.
Also, every year for the last several years, the Governing Council has been asked to identify APHA’s three main policy priority areas. APHA staff uses these to focus their work during the year. Not surprisingly for such a diverse, democratic group of public health professionals with expertise in many areas, much of the discussion centered on how specific each priority should be. Proposed and debated were both very specific and very general, overarching issues.
After much debate and discussion, Governing Council members decided that, while there were many important issues raised, APHA should continue its focus on the priority areas identified last year: Access to Health Care, now including Medicare prescription drug issues; Eliminating Health Disparities; and Rebuilding the Public Health Infrastructure. Many agreed that we have a long way to go before we can really begin to address these huge issues. More details about APHA’s work on these priority areas was published this year in the Nation’s Health and are posted at: <http://www.apha.org/journal/nation/APHApriorityareas0403.htm>.
Finally, one of the authors, Dr. Jim Gaudino, a Medical Epidemiologist at the State of Oregon Health Department, was one of the three Governing Council members elected to serve on APHA’s Nominating Committee. The Nominating Committee has the responsibility to recruit candidates to run for APHA leadership positions such as APHA’s President-Elect, Speaker of the Governing Council, and Executive Board Members. This year’s nominations are due March 5, 2004. Please feel free to contact Dr. Gaudino for further details.
After finishing our work this year, the Epidemiology Section’s Governing Council members are now looking forward to our work in 2004!
This coming year, we still need your expertise! If you would like to volunteer your scientific expertise to review either the new proposed policies or to help APHA update relevant, but out-of-date policies for the Epidemiology Section in 2004, please contact us (see below).
Also, if you are an Epidemiology Section member and would be interested in running as candidate for an Epidemiology Section governing councilor position next year, please contact: Dr. Robert McKeown at (803) 777-6220) or by e-mail at <rmckeown@gwm.sc.edu>.
You may read more about how the Epidemiology Section participates in APHA’s Governing Council, how APHA governance is structured, and how you can get involved in the April 2003 Epi Section newsletter posted at: <http://www.apha.org/sections/newsletters/epidemiology.htm>.
Dr. Jim Gaudino can be reached at (503) 731-4020 or by e-mail at <james.a.gaudino@state.or.us>.
Dr. Marian Passannante can be reached at (973) 972-4775 or by e-mail at <passanna@umdnj.edu>.