NASPGHAN Strategic Plan Report
Background: On September 12-14, 2014, approximately 30 attendees (NASPGHAN executive council, NASPGHAN councilors, committee chairs, and a subset of vice-chairs), met to chart priorities for the society for the next four years. The full list of attendees is available in appendix 1, and included members from academia, clinical practice, and hospital based practice. Both researchers and clinicians attended. William Balistreri, past NASPGHAN and NASPGHAN Foundation President, was moderator and facilitator for the meeting.
Prior to the conference, a strategic planning survey was disseminated to all NASPGHAN members, and responses from the survey helped us identify areas of interest to the membership as well as the content areas for 10 working groups, who were charged with identifying priorities. Before the meeting, a series of conference calls organized and moderated by councilors laid the groundwork for discussion of these 10 topic areas.
The meeting began Friday night, with an overview of the history of NASPGHAN by Margaret Stallings and William Balistreri. Athos Bousvaros presented the achievements and accomplishments of NASPGHAN in the past four years, most notably the high powered magnet advocacy and education program, the development of part 4 Maintenance of Certification for our members, the expansion of GIkids.org, the revision of our website, and the creation of the Council for Pediatric Nutrition Professionals. Dr. Carlo Di Lorenzo presented his vision for the future of NASPGHAN, including increasing collaborations with other societies, development of a board review course, plans to assure more society member involvement, and increasing the amount of content offered at the Annual Meeting.
Matthew Riley of the Clinical Practice Committee established the theme of the planning meeting: inclusion and engagement. While a significant proportion of our members are active in NASPGHAN, another group is less engaged, and perceives the organization to be academia-centric. A large proportion of our the meeting was devoted to planning more initiatives for members in clinical practice, and also discussing ways to more actively engage practitioners in the leadership of NASPGHAN.
On Saturday, individuals from the working groups met, established agendas, and proposed action plans. These agendas were presented to the entire group on Sunday, and priorities were established. Priorities are summarized on the following page. Many of these are inexpensive and simple, and can be easily implemented. Other more complex and expensive items will be implemented over the next 2-4 years, or as funding becomes available.
