President's Message

Stephen Scheinthal, DO President

10/6/23

I am humbled to be selected as your President for 2023-2024. I’d like to extend my gratitude to Erika Saunders, MD for her exceptional leadership. Erika guided this organization through significant change as our much beloved Frances Bell announced her desire to step down. Additionally, Erika led us out of the pandemic shutdowns and back from virtual meetings to live sessions. I am grateful for her consistency in the face of change, her strong leadership, and her mentorship of me. I am honored to call her my friend.

AACDP is uniquely our organization. It is our voice, our networking opportunity, and our support group as Chairs. When I started as Chair nine and a half years ago, it was quickly evident that AACDP was the one place where everyone understood the joys and challenges of the job. I was instantly hooked and remember telling my Dean after my first meeting that AACDP was perhaps the best and most relevant of all the conferences I attended.

In this coming year, I am looking forward to building on the change created by Frances’ retirement. We welcomed Sara Stramel-Brewer whom many of you may know from AADPRT. Sara has already embraced this organization, and as we work together, I know this will be an exciting year.

Some of what I hope you will find valuable in the coming year will includes:

Advocacy
Our first Advocacy Day was a success. I am grateful to Thad Ulzen, MD for chairing our Advocacy Committee and honing our messaging, to Craig Obey for opening APA space for us in DC and for giving us a how-to-lobby primer, and to Sara Stramel-Brewer for connecting us with hotels that did not break our budgets and allowed for comfortable accommodations that were convenient to Capitol Hill.

Visibility
We will begin to look at developing a new brand image/logo and website design that reflect who we are and the awesome responsibility we hold for the future of our nation’s mental health care. This improved image will helping ensure we are recognized as the premier psychiatric academic leadership organization that uniquely holds the future of psychiatry in its hands.

Engagement
In this coming year I want to hear from you, all of you. We will look to put out a needs assessment for you. This is our organization and we cannot move forward without knowing how AACDP can best support you and be a valuable resource for you well into the future, as it has been, and continues to be, for me.

Financial Security for the Future
We have already begun to streamline our finances and put accounts together so our funds can be more effectively managed. In the next several weeks, we will begin an audit of our finances by an outside accounting firm. Your EC authorized this audit a year ago after much discussion and realizing that while financial audits are standard practice, we could not identify the last time we had one. Our fiscal year will be realigned in the coming year. We listened to your concerns about dues notice timing. Look for your next dues notice to come out in July and we will shift our dues year to September 1 – August 31.

Membership
To increase engagement and secure our financial future, we will take a fresh look at our members. We hope to welcome back old friends who may have forgotten to pay dues or not seen AACDP as relevant and to welcome new members into the fold from both LCME and COCA medical schools. I will work closely with our membership committee to make sure new Chairs know we are here and welcome them into our family. We’ll also reach out to people we have not heard from in a while to let them know we are still here for them and would love to see them.

I know this vision is ambitious, but I believe in AACDP. There is no other organization that meets our unique needs and understands our responsibility as Chairs.

Thank you for selecting me as your president,
Stephen M. Scheinthal, DO
Professor and Chair