MCHB 2006 Federal/State Partnership Meeting

ASSOCIATION ON MATERNAL AND CHILD HEALTH UPDATE AND VISION FOR THE FUTURE OF MCH

October 15-18, 2006

PETER SYBINSKY: I know we can report great progress in this area this year, especially with the families. We've created a work force development committee. Just this spring, because of the import, we've redesigned our committee system and of the three major committee's work force development is one of them. And we've been involved in some of those members have been involved with MCHB efforts to address work force efforts as well.

With respect to assuring strong leadership, strategy, we've revised and rebuilt the new director mentor program and as a result of this meeting there have been some new ideas bouncing around about how we can even further improve it to improve the mentoring that we get from old directors with their help going into or with our help going into states where there are new directors and helping them out with their programs.

We conduct our annual conference with high quality plenary sessions and workshops and skill building. Last year's conference, we scored a 4.4 on the satisfaction scale, the conference the year before was 3.8. So we've made great improvement, I think, and we continue to commit to even further improvement to our annual conference.

We've developed tools to help our leaders with advocacy, specifically tools like the information, the presentation on economic pay off for early childhood ways to educate and improve MCH to decision makers.

We've promoted family partnerships. I can't emphasize this as a slide how far we've come this year. AMCHP has made a bylaws change to convert two board seats to family membership. And that has been done. Family members have been elected, and we do have (inaudible) Walden and Linda Hammond now as board members. Bylaws change added a fifth board delegate to states, added that fifth delegate for family representation. So every state has the opportunity now to have a voting delegate from families.

We've developed with input from our family leadership caucus recommendations for strengthening family leadership for states and summer tea board meeting the board commissioned a task force on implementing those recommendations. And finally we did have 13 family scholars attend the annual conference and one bullet that's not there we've begun meetings with Family Voices to improve our relationship with them and to further enhance our relationship with families.

Jeff.

JEFFREY LOBAS: Our third goal, there's only four, so we're almost done, is that Maternal Child Health systems, policies and programs will be aligned to evidence‑based best practices at all levels.

When I thought about what does this really mean, it to me means we want to create effective systems and not silos. We want these systems to use evidence‑based approaches as much as possible. We want Title V to be a platform for delivering all types of public health and we want all families to have medical homes that are led through our Title V agencies and our colleagues and AAP and AAFP.

PETER SYBINSKY: And working through our strategies here, we've appointed a newborn screening and genetics work group which will be providing recommendations to the states and nations on what to do with newborn screening, essentially in the long‑term follow‑up area how we can build long‑term effective follow‑up programs. We've co‑sponsored Web sites with the bureau on emergency preparedness and funding MCH.

And we've also developed expert meetings again with bureau support to address critical issues. We're having a mental health meeting of members tomorrow, and are planning a disaster response meeting in January and beginning planning for chronic disease in children and dealing with that with our members and coming up with work that can help us and policies that can help us in these rapidly changing and very germane areas.

Another strategy has been to encourage sustainable evidence‑based systems for MCH and to meet that we've created the Emerging Issues Committee to look and do a scan of the MCH environment and to point out and address emerging issues of import.

We've also created a new best practices review panel to highlight state innovations, to give them recognition both at our annual conference as well as on our Web site and to allow interchange and exchange of that information between our members.

JEFFREY LOBAS: Okay last but not least as we develop our strategic plan, we felt it was important to look within. So this goal is related to the AMCHP as an organization, and it's AMCHP will be an effective and efficient organization and the vision around that is that we are going to create a culture of responsiveness to members, to partners, to our clientele and a culture of continuous improvement.

We want to create a culture of excellence and not mediocrity and a culture of activism and not passiveness.

PETER SYBINSKY: One of the key areas of improving our organization is to improve its partnerships and we can report new and enhanced and developed or improved partnerships with organizations such as the bureau, ASTO and its affiliates, National Council of State Legislators, NGA, City Match, Family Voices and a wide range of organizations that we haven't put on here.

We just had a meeting with that match on Monday night. So these are still being added to our list.

Continuously evaluate and improve organizational effectiveness is another strategy. And we've contracted for a full‑on evaluation of AMCHP, one that will be built into our strategic plan, which will focus on improvement of strategic plan goals and which will cover the whole organization.

Assuring the financial health of the organization. This is a very dry slide, and I just won't cover each of these individually, but you can notice the things that we've done to do things smarter, better, cheaper, more effectively.

We've reorganized the organization. We've restructured it to serve members better, to emphasize the key nexus between policy and program, to highlight the importance of policy to program in the organization.

And we are supporting peer to peer mentoring and technical interchange and building that base as part of our efforts.

And finally better communications, improving our regional communications has been a high priority, and you can see already the results of our regional surveys which we've put into one of the Web site, one of the MCH webcasts recently in which we have on our Web site the results of the cuts to Title V and other information about state needs and state concerns.

We also have developed that new committee structure and appointed a communications task force to see how AMCHP can better communicate into the future.

We have one more slide then I'm going to turn it over to Jeff. But I think these, I want to say one thing and that is these changes could not have been done without people.

We talk about partnerships at this meeting and partnerships have been so effective. Within our organization, these things have been done with great staff and many of whom are here today and we commit to make sure they're going to be here in the future, working with you.

A very active membership, committed leadership, and supportive partners. A special thanks to the bureau for helping us get to the launching pad this year and get these things into the air and going.

You can expect more from AMCHP and I'll let Jeff wrap up.

JEFFREY LOBAS: Actually, I would like AMCHP staff and our board to stand up, if we would. We just want you to see who our people are.

These are your leaders, these are your staff. These are the people that will move us forward with you. So I would ask you to use them. I would ask you to talk with them. I would ask you to push us, to push the envelope. We need to represent you. We need to hear from you. We need to be action‑oriented.

There was never a time in history that I believe this organization it is more important. We need to convene and partner and bring together a dialogue that moves us to that new vision of the future for children, for families, for women. So we're ready to do it with your help and involvement, and I thank you for your attention.

(Applause)

Thank you. We have a couple of minutes before we move into the next session which should be seamless.

Are there any questions that any of you have for either of our two speakers? I also want to encourage everybody right now, before we do anything, to pull out your evaluation sheets, which is the back of your or the front of your book. I think they're yellow. And fill those out. This is an important piece of feedback, helps us produce these programs and make sure that they're responsive to what you want to hear as well.

Any questions?

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Peter, could you describe what you talk about as the new committee (inaudible) a little more for us?

PETER SYBINSKY: The new committees, we have three new committees, Emerging Issues, which is sort of a water front scanning effort. Their objective is to identify key issues, bring them to the board, get board approval to proceed with those issues on a very time limited basis. We're not going to create committees that go on forever, but rather focused committees that are going to have a product in a short period of time.

And we've already begun to work on issues like chronic disease, preconception health, as two of the three areas and the third area escapes me.

Work force is the second committee. Let me first recognize Bill Hollinshead as the co‑chair of the Emerging Issues Committee. Ralph Schubert, who is not with us, just resigned and he played a key role in the development of that committee as well.

We are looking for committee members, so please Emerging Issues and the other committees, please talk to the people who are the co‑chairs.

Work force development is headed up by Chuck Onufer and Susanna Duley, and they're going to be working with the bureau on a survey along with that match on a survey of member needs in the work force area, among other things that their work plan has.

And finally the third area is healthcare financing. Jim Bryant and Phyllis Sawyer are heading up that committee. And their area is defined as healthcare financing, SCHIP, Medicaid, private insurance, things that relate to that. A big plate for all those committees. We need help and that's the structure.