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Resident Recruitment to Have More Prominent Place on APA Agenda

As I start this year as your president, I would like to set some goals with you and have benchmarks for us to measure and evaluate how well I am doing as your president. Why does this matter? So that this year will be a partnership and may better allow you, our membership, to choose leaders in coming years and to hold us accountable. Further, it will help define and shape policy for APA and will, therefore, shape our future.

One of the key issues for our organization, in fact for most organizations, is membership recruitment and retention. How do we bring in new members, help members be active and participatory at various levels of the organization, help them get value for their money, and retain them through various phases of their careers and life? How do we facilitate transitions from members-in-training to early career psychiatrists, from mid-life to lifetime members? Further, APA has many competitors for members' dues, especially in the subspecialty organizations. Psychiatrists are now, more than ever, identifying with their subspecialty groups and attending those groups' meeting and paying dues to those organizations. We are doing well at APA right now, but as with all membership organizations, we always can do better and must improve at both recruiting and retaining members.

These are among my goals:

• Make sure that all medical students and psychiatry residents are provided with easy ways to join APA. I will work with Deborah Hales, M.D., and Nancy Delanoche in the APA Division of Education and Career Development and our colleagues in the Association of Directors of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry (ADMSEP) and American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training (AADPRT) to make this a banner year for recruitment. I always have had a dream of a "white-coat ceremony" for joining APA. Becoming a member of APA should be a critical moment in one's professional life. Whether this presentation can be made at annual meetings of district branches or at academic institutions with the district branch president participating, the idea is worthy of consideration. I would like to hear your thoughts.
  
• Currently APA is not represented at department of psychiatry graduations, which occur across the United States and Canada. I would like to work with our colleagues at American Psychiatric Publishing Inc. to provide either an APPI book or a coupon for a book to all graduating psychiatry residents. This will help provide a solid, positive, supportive message to all our graduates from APA for a job well done.
  
• We may also want to consider giving an APA award at graduation to the resident who has been "the best teacher" as voted by the faculty or students. For many years, APA has recognized the importance of residents as teachers, and it might be a good idea to think through the possibility of such an award. It would be great to see district branch or chapter presidents bestow the award at graduation ceremonies to make the academic–district branch link even stronger.
  
• More active interchange is needed between APA and its district branches regarding local models for improving member retention. There is a range of issues that are unique to certain geographic regions, such as economics and politics, and make a "one-size-fits-all" solution to retention a difficult one. We are looking at a range of changes that might be options for district branches to consider as ways to help retain members. Over the next couple of months, we hope we can do more problem solving and develop creative ways to help with local issues.
  

I will give you a progress report on how we are doing with these goals and would like to hear from you in the meantime about whether we should modify them.

I look forward to serving you this coming year and to hearing from you with your ideas and input at mriba{at}umich.edu. Thank you.

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