Title: Committee on Veterans Health Needs a New Chair

Author:

Section/SPIG: Medical Care

Issue Date:

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Effective at the APHA Annual Meeting in New Orleans in November 2005, I am stepping down as chair of the Committee on Veterans Health because I have lost my connections with the field and just can't keep up-to-date. My own veterans organization, the American Veterans Committee (AVC), being basically a WW II organization, finally found itself too worn out to keep functioning, and so we formally went out of existence. The Medical Care Section now needs someone who does have contacts at the DVA and the Veterans Healthcare Administration to maintain a flow of information for our members. Connections too with the Pentagon's far-flung health activities would not hurt.

I have tried to arrange Annual Meeting activities with two foci. First, we ought to be a place where people doing biomedical and health services and related research can report their findings and have a place to get together and compare notes and plans. Second, commensurate with our interest in health services access for all Americans, we ought to be the place where quality of care and access to services, which are (and ought to be) available to veterans and service personnel and their families, can be monitored, and solutions to problems can be devised and advocated. To these ends, for example, we held a session on medical errors and their prevention in Boston.

Anyone interested in the post should contact current Section Chair John B. Wayne at <jbwayne@ualr.edu>.