Insight Matters
Summer, 2004

Our goals are attainable!
by Herman A. Tolbert, M.D., President

Executive Director Janet Shaw and I represented OPA at a meeting of APA District branch Presidents and Executive Directors at this year's APA annual meeting in New York. I was pleased to see that Ohio stands proudly amongst district branches around the country. We are ahead of the game in many respects and many of the issues we have struggled with were mentioned by others and they had no magic solutions that we didn't.

Committee work has begun
On return from the meeting, I continued the task of completing our roster of members of the committees in which much of the work of the organization is done. I am pleased to report that most of the positions have been filled by a group of willing and capable members that we will all be proud to have working in the trenches for us. Some of them may call upon you with questions or requests for assistance and I hope that you will recieve those calls gladly. The success of the organization is dependent on your active support and involvement. I look forward to a review at year's end in which we can all see ourselves having made progress towards the organizational goals I articulated to you in my previous column.

Support of OPPAC is vital
We certainly have challenges ahead of us, however, they are attainable with your help. Many avenues are available to you--one of which is through your donations to OPPAC. I would like to challenge each of you to match my donation of the proceeds of at least two hours of my professional services to OPPAC. These funds would allow us to make significant headway in our upcoming battle against psychologist's prescribing privileges. We must make contact with legislators and the public to inform them of the differences between psychiatarists and psychologists and the potential risks to patients of having anyone without medical training and experience prescribing medications. I hope that you will also volunteer to make personal contacts with your own congressional representatives. We will be developing materials to be available for your use when you make those contacts.

All must be represented
I would like to see OPA be representative of all sectors of our psychiatry. To that end I have added new committes of the Chairs of Departments of Psychiatry, and Residency Training Directors. This will allow us to do joint projects designed to keep the membership on the cutting edge of continuing education and service delivery. We also want to double our efforts to attract new trainees into Psychiatry and to share our knowledge of how to weather the developmental stresses of maturing as professional through our Psychiatric Mentors Committee. Clinical Practice issues continue to be challenging in all of our subspecialties and are another focus of concern. Our contacts with the public, patients, other physicians, the press and the legislature are all crucial and require special care in thier performance. The diversity our members and our patients also means that we must make every effort to broaden our knowledge base and techniques.

I am sure you can see from this summary that there are multiple areas of focus and we need all of your support to be successful. We may call upon you to accomplish our goals and when we do, I hope you will respond with the enthusiasm that we have received so far.

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