A Message from the NAP President
by Andrea Pfeifle, EdD, PT, FNAP
The National Academies of Practice's Vision is to become the alliance of professionals collaborating to transform health and well-being. Our mission is to advance interprofessional education, scholarship, research, practice, and public policy, by:
- Educating and informing our members and others;
- Facilitating collaborative scholarship and research opportunities;
- Recruiting, engaging, retaining, and mentoring our network of members; and
- Advocating the value of interprofessional practice and improving healthcare and policy for all.
The central tenets of our work together are grounded in the core values of collaboration, patient-centeredness, inclusivity, and interconnectedness.
These words are posted on our website and guide every decision, every product, and every interaction in our organization. We operationalize them in how we work with each other and how we spend our time together. And they are the reason I am so excited to be your current President and proud to work alongside Rick Weisbarth (Past-President), Tony Breitbach (President-Elect), the NAP Council of Academy Chairs and Chair-Elects, and our Association Management Team from AMR – Melanie Bowzer (Executive Director), Jess Campbell (Project Coordinator), Tracy Tucker (Executive Vice President and Client Liaison), Alexa Bell (Education and Events Manager), and others.
Grounded in our 42-year history of bringing together the "best-of-the-best" interdisciplinary body of health practitioners to advise Congress as to how to move health and healthcare forward for the American people, and amplified by our now more than 900 members representing 15 Academies and an Associate Member Group of individuals who are extraordinarily gifted, talented, committed, and united toward doing exactly that. We are indeed moving toward our vision. Before, during, and in today's post-pandemic world, NAP continues the hard work to identify and remove barriers, increase opportunities for collaboration, and re-examine assumptions that interfere with the pen-ultimate Quintuple Aim for health care, focusing on health equity; clinician well-being; and the pursuit of better health, improved outcomes, and lower costs.
Each area of our mission is led by a Vice President who is dedicated to shepherding our precious member resources of passion and time into meaningful work. Many thanks to Laurel Abbruzzese (Membership), Juli Maxworthy (Partnerships and Networking), Al Rundio (Scholarship), Lynn Williams (Professional Development), and Joanne Wisely (Public Policy) for their dedication. Our goal is to engage every member of NAP who wants to be involved in our work together. And so, we gathered names of individuals interested in serving in specific areas at the 2023 Forum and through a recent Membership Survey. As the year progresses, members will continue to be invited to participate in various short- and longer-term service opportunities related to our key mission areas. In the meantime, please use NAP NetCon to search and connect with members who have expertise and interests that you share.
NAP's Vision, Mission, and Core Values shaped the Council's work together at its Fall 2022 Council meeting, resulted in our singular goal for 2023-2026 wholly dedicated to "Creating a culture of cross-academy collaboration," and embodied in the operational goals of our day-to-day work as well as through the advancement of our Strategic Interprofessional Initiative, to "Demonstrate interprofessional best practices and expertise in education, scholarship, research, practice, and public policy," through a capstone project that showcases the impact interprofessional collaboration can have – specifically on the Social Determinants of Health. A great deal of preliminary planning has occurred in the Leadership Team, the Executive Committee, and the Council to understand the best way to launch the Strategic Initiative. In addition, many of our members participated in the NAP Virtual Town Hall on June 14 to advise member needs as we begin our work together. Key themes that emerged at the Town Hall include recommendations for:
- Education around social determinants of health using a variety of modalities.
- Providing an assortment of variable length and multi-modal opportunities for members to participate.
- Clear and consistent communication of goals, objectives, and deliverables throughout the Initiative.
- Integration of the patient/consumer perspective into the work.
As next steps, the Strategic Interprofessional Initiative Steering Committee will work across our Academies to integrate these recommendations and to understand the breadth and depth of existing cross-academy initiatives. More details are forthcoming. Doing this kind of deep interprofessional work is, in some ways, unchartered territory for NAP, though we have been laying the groundwork for it for many years. I am excited about the opportunities the Strategic Interprofessional Initiative presents to us as an organization.
All of this, and other great work NAP members and guests are doing, will be showcased in the March 14-16, 2024 Forum (https://www.napractice.org/annual-meeting-forum), Synergizing Strengths: Uniting Professions for Strategic Impact. I hope you are planning to attend. I look forward to seeing you there.
