Fall 2001, Vol. 9, No. 1

President's Letter:
Message from the President

By C. Donald Williams, MD, CGP
Yakima, WA

Two AOOP achievements over the last year add value for current members.

1) Our new website (www.aoop.org) is professionally hosted and designed, and enables us to project AOOP to a wide range of interested parties. Our board members have been interviewed several times in the last 6 months by the media as a direct consequence of the new website, demonstrating its value as an outreach tool. We have the capacity to update the website every two weeks, so that the information will be fresh and useful. We are working to update the membership list database. You may have noticed that there is a list of new members, as well as preliminary information about our 2002 Meeting in San Diego posted on the "What's New" page.

2) Steve Heidel, with the input of the executive committee, led the presentation of the most useful integrated Basic Skills Workshop to date in the 2001 meeting. We are emphasizing courses that teach immediately useful skills that can be utilized by psychiatrists interested in organizational and occupational psychiatry. These skills include how to perform long term psychiatric disability evaluations, worker's compensation psychiatric disability evaluations, social security psychiatric disability evaluations, and threat assessments. Our aim is to provide a foundation of these essential skills for new members and to extend the course material into more specialized areas of psychiatric practice for those that want to expand their repertoire—for example, in the direction of consultation to family owned businesses or corporate consultation. You may have already discovered that your conduct of regular psychotherapy has been enriched by your awareness of the importance of work related issues as they apply to your patients. For example, the concept of "coaching" as applied to executives can be woven into the treatment of many patients who are facing challenges in their work situation.

As announced on our website we have a new management company, Potomac Event Productions. Carol Deck is our contact person, and she can be reached by phone, fax, or email. I have been more than pleased with PEP's performance and service to AOOP since they assumed management responsibilities for AOOP's affairs. They have been prompt and responsive, and have also demonstrated initiative and imagination. I look forward to a long and productive association with PEP.

One last change that you will all appreciate is that we now have permanent telephone, fax, and email address for the AOOP office. These are portable, and in the event that we have another management company change in the future, the phone numbers and email address will remain the same! This information can be found in this bulletin as well as on our website.

We continue to work to support the Business Initiative undertaken by the APA. We believe that our members are particularly well equipped to assist in this enterprise, and we expect AOOP to grow as this project moves forward.

 
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