AOA focuses on addressing member needs

Issue: June 2002

ByNancy Hemphill, ELS, FAAO

As the American Optometric Association prepares for its 105^th Congress June 26 to 30, we spoke with some of the organization’s leaders to review the highlights of the past year as well as provide a glimpse of what to expect in New Orleans.

A major push of the AOA for the foreseeable future will be addressing member needs, based on events at a December 2001 president-elect planning meeting as well as a membership summit held in January.

Membership summit

More than 200 representatives from all the state associations participated in a membership summit in January as part of the AOA’s Mid-Year Planning Meeting in Las Vegas. The format for the summit, called Camp Crossroads, consisted of formal presentations followed by breakout sessions. The attendees were divided into teams. A presenter brought up an issue and then the team worked on it and collectively reported back with expanded needs and suggested solutions. Everyone voted on which team came up with the best solutions. The results were all tracked by AOA staff, logged into spreadsheets and categorized.

“Since that summit, 27 states are now implementing a membership campaign, which I think is pretty exciting,” Michael D. Jones, OD, AOA executive director, told Primary Care Optometry News. “Our membership summit was very successful because it created a lot of interest in this area, and now we’re seeing that the states are really active with membership drives and programs to meet member needs.”

Member needs were also a priority at the president-elect planning meeting in December for J. Pat Cummings, OD, incoming president. At that meeting, the Board of Trustees, senior volunteers and senior staff were all asked to suggest the five biggest issues facing the profession externally and five the organization faced internally. Everyone’s 10 issues were categorized, all attendees voted for which five they thought were the most important and then breakout groups strategized to decide how to address each need, said Dr. Jones.

According to Dr. Jones, some of the most popular needs identified were:

to improve public understanding and increase demand for optometric services
to eliminate all barriers – public and private – to accessing optometric services
to provide AOA members with up-to-date clinical practice management and education materials
for the AOA to be recognized as the information source for eye care
to recognize ODs’ commonality within different modes of practice

“This information was distributed to every department within the AOA so everyone could work on ways to address member needs in the form of expanded or more comprehensive services and in the areas of technology,” he said. “The board has been emphatic that they want every purchase the AOA makes and every service the AOA offers to address one of the member needs that was recognized from these two processes.

“We spent a lot of time, manpower and money putting all of this together,” said Dr. Jones, “and now we’re formulating a number of different offerings to present to the board over the next 6 to 12 months so we can determine how to best address our members’ needs.”

In the meantime, the AOA has added two positions to its marketing department to assist in developing recruitment materials and with program and brochure development.

AOA Congress 2002

One of the highlights of this year’s annual congress will be the introduction of the new presidential theme. Incoming president Dr. Cummings, incoming president-elect Victor J. Connors, OD, and incoming vice president Wesley E. Pittman, OD, decided to jointly promote “Healthy Eyes, Healthy People” as the presidential theme for the next 3 years.

“The thought behind this is that AOA needs to be active in health policy development and implementation,” said Dr. Cummings. “Health policy dictates what AOA does for its members, the members’ patients and the public.”

For the first time, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Healthy People 2010 refers to specific eye conditions and optometrists’ role in preventing or treating them. “We must sit at the table of the public health community as an equal and respected partner,” said Dr. Cummings. “We will strive to make a greater impact on not just the visual health of our patients, but their health overall.”

Two key issues in the House of Delegates will address nominations and subspecialty certification. Last year, the House of Delegates mandated that a project team study subspecialty certification. The project team consisted of 10 individuals who represented other major optometric organizations.

“The team has decided that subspecialty certification is a very complex issue and more time is needed to develop a final report,” said Dr. Jones. “They will recommend to the House of Delegates that the study be continued and that they will report back to the house in San Diego in June 2003.”

House of Delegates members will also vote on a change to the nominating process, which would revise the manner in which members of the Nominating Committee are appointed and change the time for presentation of its report to the House of Delegates.

Dr. Jones said the members are excited about Jimmy Carter opening the congress’ general session on June 27. Also generating excitement are an increase in both exhibit hall sales and registration over last year.

Advocacy conference

A highlight of 2001 was the Advocacy Conference held in Philadelphia in September, which was attended by about 200 representatives from all states. “We got all the states together to talk about state legislative matters, review what had occurred in the past year or so and gather their opinions on going forward,” said David Mills, OD, who led the conference. “We also solicited feedback from the states in terms of what role they thought the AOA should be playing.

“We discussed all of the issues states deal with, whether it be comanagement, scope of practice or children’s vision initiatives,” he continued. “It’s the type of meeting we hold every year. Sometimes we do it on a large scale or sometimes in a smaller group, depending on what the hot topics may be in the individual states.”

AOA President David W. Nelson, OD, MBA, told Primary Care Optometry News: “We’re redirecting our state legislative efforts to find a commonality between the state legislation and AOA and focus on specific legislative issues such as the children’s vision initiative now that all states have attained therapeutic rights. We need to get everyone marching in the same direction. We probably won’t achieve the uniformity we’d like to because of the individual nature of state legislation, and we want to protect state rights.

“This new direction,” he continued, “may also pursue expanding scope of practice. With the changes in technology that will be available, we want to ensure that these new procedures and techniques will be in the armamentarium of optometrists. We want to make sure we’re identifying those trends and that state laws support those efforts. We’re in the vision enhancement profession. We want to do everything a patient desires to preserve or enhance their vision.”

“It was the best state legislative meeting we ever had,” said Dr. Jones. “We are clearly trying to reach the younger state politicos, because we are seeing a changing of the guard. ODs like myself were involved in the DPA [diagnostic pharmaceutical agent] battle. Now we’re retiring. And the TPA [therapeutic pharmaceutical agent] fighters are getting to the age where they will be retiring before long. We’re tired, and it’s hard to have that fire in your belly for 40 years. So we tried to sensitize the young leaders with some historical aspect and the importance of legislative activity.”

Children’s vision initiative

As individual states are attempting to pass legislation requiring pre-school eye exams, the AOA is supporting its members’ efforts. “We are developing educational pieces that will be given to AOA members on infants’ and children’s eye examinations to heighten their interest in the skills in this area,” said Dr. Jones. “The AOA — in conjunction with the Vision Council of America — is offering a grant to every state for implementing a children’s vision program. We’re also developing an educational piece on a CD-ROM to send to all AOA members.”

“We must work toward comprehensive eye exams for all children,” said Dr. Cummings. “Remember, only 14% of children age 6 and under have received an eye exam.”

Web site changes

Dr. Jones urges ODs to check out the AOA’s redesigned web site (http://www.aoanet.org), which has been improved to be more user-friendly. Visitors can find complete AOA Congress program information through a link from the home page without having to register to use the site.

Dr. Jones said visits to the site have more than quadrupled since the redesign. “We have all kinds of reporting and tracking capabilities for both members and non-members to see how many new visitors we have, how many come back and how long they view the site,” he said.

“We’ve also had a lot of positive feedback from the redesign and reformatting of the AOA News,” he continued. “The new departments have been well received.”

For Your Information:

Michael D. Jones, OD, can be reached at 243 N. Lindbergh Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63141; (800) 365-2219, ext. 252; fax: (314) 991-4101; e-mail: MDJones@theaoa.org.

J. Pat Cummings, OD, can be reached at 116 South Main St., Sheridan, WY 82801; (307) 674-7331; fax: (307) 674-8042.

David Mills, OD, can be reached at 1050 Centerville Rd., Warwick, RI 02886; (401) 828-3200; fax: (410) 828-3202.

David W. Nelson, OD, MBA, is the outgoing president of the AOA. He can be reached at 7428 Mineral Pt. Rd., Madison, WI 53717-1710; (608) 833-4242; fax: (608) 831-9249; e-mail: AmOptBdDWN@aol.com.