Planning for the Future gets Closer and Farther: a Report on the AAPM Board Meeting at the Spring Clinical Meeting (and an announcement on the Societies Consortium on Sexual Harassment in STEMM)

For the second year running, your AAPM Board of Directors met at the Spring Clinical meeting to do strategic planning for the Association. Last year, the planning centered around finalizing the current strategic plan. At that time, over two days, the Board as a whole evaluated, analyzed and approved the plan. (See AAPM Newsletter — Volume 43 No. 4 — July|August 2018.) Admittedly, there had been work on the plan by all the councils, committees, and much of the membership before the meeting. This year, something more amazing happened. But first, an announcement:
After discussion that included several committees, AAPM became an Inaugural Member of the Societies Consortium on Sexual Harassment in STEMM. The consortium is organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and includes at least 77 societies as of this writing. More information can be found at these websites:
https://www.aaas.org/news/aaas-joins-52-organizations-launch-societies-consortium-sexual-harassment-stemm
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6434/1408

The last “M” in STEMM stands for medicine, which apparently is a recent addition to the science, technology, engineering and math.

Back to the Board meeting. This year, the Board, sitting as one large strategic planning committee, took on planning for the future. This took three steps and followed the model from the President's Workshop at the Nashville meeting. The first step was to envision what we would like the AAPM and medical physics to be like 20 years from now, recognizing the changes we can envision. The second step was to identify the likely impediments that could keep us from getting to our ideal future. The final exercise was to think about what steps AAPM should take now to set us on a course to overcome or avoid the impediments and move toward our bright future. I will spare you a lot of details, such as the groups into which the board broke to consider these questions (see Figure 1) or the presentations at the Board meeting (Figure 2). The Newsletter deadline falling right after the meeting does not allow great detail of that. Bulleted descriptions of the future we would want is shown in Figure 3. Some of the suggested actions are shown in Figure 4, and I will include a complete list in the next Newsletter. We tried not to reject ideas, not that all suggested actions will be taken, or should be taken, but all should be considered.

The next step is to go through all the suggested immediate actions and, for each suggestion, see if there is an appropriate committee to send it for discussion. There were far too many suggestions to take on them all; AAPM just does not have the bandwidth for that. (However, only about 30% of our members are active in committees. If we can increase that, we might be able to take on more of the suggestions.) The committees will report back to the Board their recommendations on each suggestion and the Board will prioritize what actions to take.

This is all very exciting. Keep in mind that the actions we need to take to get to our ideal future in 20 years will continue to evolve, change and develop for the next 20 years.