Home > PULSE September 2006.:
PULSE - September 2006 edition
Welcome to the September issue of PULSE. In this issue, you will find:
1. An article about the AMPHL registry - Nhgi Lu and Tom Kavic have been collecting information about deaf/hard of hearing individuals in the medical profession
2. A message from our President - Candie Corriher discusses issues with the next convention, committees, and other topics
3. A story about the current "Member in the Spotlight" - a member is highlighted every month
4. A summary of the results of the recent survey conducted by AMPHL - more details to come in the next issue after the board finalizes its deliberations but here are the basic results.
5. News about AMPHL members - a new feature that will appear every month; we hope people will let us know about significant events in their lives to be included in future editions.
6. News about posting openings for committee and board openings beginning with the next PULSE issue (March)
We hope you enjoy this issue. Please send any suggestions or comments to the editor, Philip Zazove at pzaz@umich.edu.
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ARE YOU REGISTERED? GET REGISTERED! THE AMPHL REGISTRY COMMITTEE
Nghi Lu and Thomas Kavic, Committee Co-Chairs
You made it this far in your education or career. You deserve mention in a list of Who’s Who among Deaf or Hard of Hearing Healthcare Professionals!
The Registry Committee of the AMPHL is set up to document the achievements of individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing in the fields of healthcare including human medicine, veterinary medicine, nursing, pharmacy, audiology, and others. This registry is patterned after the list of deaf or hard of hearing individuals achieving doctoral level degrees published in the book called "Deaf Heritage," written by Jack Gannon back in 1981. One of the aims of this present registry is to provide an updated version of doctoral professionals and other healthcare professionals who are deaf or hard of hearing.
With today's climate of political correctness, the Americans with Disability Act, and increased availability of resources or accommodations, more and more individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing are now able to accomplish higher goals than their forebears. It seems fitting and sensible to have some resource or documentation that reflects those accomplishments and which can be presented in an honorable manner to the public. It is the registry’s hope that this will inspire other deaf or hard of hearing individuals to pursue their dreams of achieving education beyond secondary school and progress further in life.
Another purpose of the Registry Committee of the AMPHL is to gather more accurate demographic statistics for deaf or hard of hearing healthcare professionals. AMPHL occasionally gets inquiries from schools, journalists, and researchers regarding general demographic data of our unique group of healthcare professionals. Unfortunately without concrete data, we can only guess the answers to their questions such as “How many doctors, nurses, vets, etc., are deaf or hard of hearing?” “Where are most deaf or hard of hearing healthcare professionals located?” “What medical specialties do most of these professionals choose to practice?” More precise statistics can be provided as more and more deaf or hard of hearing people join the registry.
As of now, there are a little over thirty deaf or hard of hearing healthcare professionals who have submitted their names to the AMPHL registry. Of these, 30% are physicians; 25% are nurses; 15% are veterinarians; 15% are audiologists; and the remainder comes from various allied health fields. The Registry Committee would like to increase the number of people or names in the AMPHL registry. We invite any healthcare professional who is deaf or hard of hearing to fill out and submit a registry form. If you know someone else who qualifies to be in the registry, please pass along word of this registry and encourage him or her to join. The more deaf or hard of hearing professionals who are listed in the registry, the easier it will be for AMPHL to maintain accurate statistics and better answer demographical questions from the public. Names and personal information will not be released without a person’s permission. The registry form can be accessed via the AMPHL website or at this link: http://www.amphl.org/registryform.pdf. Interested people may also send an email to request a form or to ask questions to the following address: registry1@amphl.org.
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News about AMPHL members
This will be a new column, highlighting some of the latest activities and accomplishments of AMPHL members. We believe this column will allow us to highlight the expertise and vast range of areas that deaf and hard of hearing health professionals are involved in. Please, don’t be bashful. If you have a new job, moved to the next level of training, been appointed to a committee, published, are involved in community service, or have any other accomplishment, please send the information to the editor (Philip Zazove at pzaz@umich.edu).
Sam Atcherson
Finished his Ph.D., and is now Assistant Professor of Audiology at the University of South Dakota. He also received a $500 award and plaque for his dissertation research in a student Research Forum competition at the 2006 American Academy of Audiology Convention in Minneapolis, MN. http://www.audiologyfoundation.org/2006research_awards.php
Elizabeth Eldakar
Has been working as a PA for Seavin Personnel Support Services, under a U.S. government contract, To provide primary and emergency medical services to U.S. military, government contractors, government personnel and their families at remote sites in Egypt. She finds it exciting to work in a third world country with exposure to international and tropical medicine, including last spring’s Avian Flu outbreak.
Nghi Lu
Graduated from UCLA SOM this year. She is currently doing an internship at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center Internal Medicine Program, in preparation for doing a residency in radiology.
Danielle Rastetter
Has started giving presentations to a local shelter's staff and volunteers about disease transmission within the shelter environment and body condition scoring on cats (and what we can do to help the fat ones!)
Nancy Rennert
Was appointed Chief of Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism, Norwalk Hospital (Yale affiliated teaching hospital in CT). Her research focus is currently inpatient diabetes care. She presented her group’s findings at the national American Diabetes Association meetings in Washington DC in June and publications are in press.
Philip Zazove
Was recently appointed by Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm to be a member of her Environmental Science Advisory Board.
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Member in the Spotlight
Erica Hill
Erica Hill is definitely a pioneer. A first generation Kiwi, she was the first severely deaf persons to be accepted into a medical school to become a physician in New Zealand. And recently, I had the pleasure to talk with her over dinner about what it was like.
She was born a rubella baby, nearly ½ a century ago. Her mother was not believed when she told her family doctor that she thought Erica was deaf- thus she was not formally diagnosed with a severe hearing loss until she was 8 years old. The school at that time wanted to hold her back because of apparent slowness. One of her teachers did not agree with his colleagues and told her mother so. Eventually the loss was confirmed . Hearing aids were prescribed but could only be used on the right ear. Back then, that meant the big, bulky kind with wires running from the ear to an amplifier hooked onto vests/ blouses/ hung on a chain in a bag.
Erica was mainstreamed . Psychological testing requested by the Deaf School when she was 12 showed she was above average intelligence, which was not news to her mother. She credits a few supportive teachers with giving her the courage and confidence to do well. Her parents were also very supportive of her scholarly efforts – until she decided to go to medical school. They discouraged this, encouraging her to pursue other careers. That didn’t deter Erica. She applied anyway. Before she could be formally accepted , the then Dean requested an assessment by an ENT specialist who later told her he had decided to recommend they school not accept her ( would be too hard with her level of hearing ) but after meeting her, he changed his mind.
Medical school in those days was quite different from now in that no support services were available then. Even today there is no CART facility. The school did pay for her to Xerox notes of her classmates, but she had to do all the copying herself. Once she reached the clinical years the group of trainees she was with would help each other out and the Registrars (equivalent of residents in the United States) would normally assess all incoming patients so the information from that would be already in the file before she did her own history /exam.
So if there was a murmur – which she did not hear – it would be already documented by the Registrar. However a lot of the time bedside teaching was lost on her because she missed a lot and did not know it. She used her powers of observation a lot and was not afraid to ask questions.
There were Consultants who thought she should not be doing clinical medicine and over the years has had to deal with a lot of discrimination, and had to find her own solutions and adaptations as there had been no predecessor.
After finishing training and beginning to practice, Erica’s hearing slowly worsened. Because it happened so slowly, she didn’t notice it and thought that she was just stressed from work. She decided to compare audiograms and she saw an ENT classmate agreed that there was a significant deterioration At the time she felt that she may not be able to continue in clinical medicine for much longer – things were just too tiring. She subsequently got a cochlear implant for the left ear at a private hospital in Auckland in 1999- Family and anonymous donors paid for this. It had been considered that if she waited till she met the Government funding criteria that it would be too late – she would have already had to leave medicine.
She continued to use her hearing aid on the other ear. It helped significantly – enough to post- pone a departure from clinical medicine , but since then there has been a continuing gradual decrease in her hearing in what had been her better ear. That is causing increasing difficulty communicating with patients and restricting the work load she can take on – hence part time and no further after hours . Her specialists recommended that she consider an implant in the other ear, but is not able to fund this.
Erica is a vocationally registered General Practitioner ( equivalent to Board accreditation in Family Medicine ) working as an independent contractor for a partnership in Tokoroa, in the central North Island,. Her colleagues who own the practice have been very supportive and accommodating . She’s been there for seven years, after five years in another practice close by.
She attended the second AMPHL meeting in Ohio 2002 , and derived tremendous validation and support from meeting others with similar situations to her. It reduced the sense of isolation she has in an insular country! She believes AMPHL provides enormous benefits to not only its members, but to many others as well who would be otherwise unaware that there are Professionals successfully practicing in Medicine and related fields.
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Survey Results
During the summer, AMPHL conducted a survey to better understand what people desire from the organization and what areas of focus should be considered for the future. Requests for participation was widely distributed in various arenas, including listserves, the website, the forums and by in-person request. Forty-five people responded, providing a wealth of information from both their answers to direct questions as well as their commentaries. The results are currently being analyzed and discussed by the board. There will clearly be improvements and changes made over the next year or two, though exactly what and when will depend on the deliberations of the board.
Below is an overview of the findings. Any thoughts or suggestions can be directed to the editor, Philip Zazove, at pzaz@umich.edu
Results of survey:
(not everyone answered each question)
1. Why subscribe AMPHL
a. Support AMPHL – 32
b. PULSE – 8
c. Conference discounts – 7
d. Gift items – 3
e. Get information for job, etc. – 7
2. How many years in AMPHL?
a. <=1 year – 13
b. 2 years - 8
c. 3 years - 7
d. >3 years – 14
3. Area of health care
a. Physicians – 15
b. Vets – 3
c. Nurse – 10
d. Pharmacy – 3
e. PT – 1
f. Audiology – 4
g. Other – 9
4. Major benefits of AMPHL
a. Advocacy – 38
b. PULSE – 17
c. Forums – 29
d. Networking – 37
e. Visibility – 28
f. Other – 6
5. Continue to subscribe if PULSE were available to all
a. Yes – 35
b. No – 4
6. Attend Conference before?
a. Yes
i. 1 year – 13
ii. 2 years – 4
iii. 3 years – 2
b. Attend in future?
i. Yes – 13
ii. Maybe 3
iii. No – 26
c. Major reasons not:
i. Time – 7
ii. Money – 5
iii. Distance too far – 3
7. Stage of career
a. In Training – 8
b. Postgraduate training – 7
c. < 5 years of practice – 7
d. > 5 years of practice – 17
e. Other – 1
8. On AMPHL committees now?
a. Yes – 11
b. No – 31
i. In future, if asked?
1. Yes – 16
2. No – 10
3. Maybe – 2
9. Comments – see attached commentary section
The only associations between variables seem to be with number of years with AMPHL and stage of career, with lower number of years in AMPHL more likely to be early in their training.
Summary of multiple commentaries in response to question: What would encourage more subscribers?
1. Add additional benefits or close some current benefits to be available only to subscribers, such as the forum, discounts on devices/stethescopes
2. More networking opportunities, regional get-togethers, setup exhibit booths at various professional and educational conferences (including Deaf high schools)
3. Increased marketing and publicity, including offering PULSE to the public
4. Putting it on Yahoo! Groups and having a moderator screen interested persons and signing them up.
5. Low fees
6. Visibility in professional/advocacy organizations, other organizations (ALDA)
7. More information about AMPHL given to the various HOH/deaf internet FORUMS, maybe have yearly or semi yearly notices sent to the various HOH groups on internet such as CI clarion group, Nucleus Forum ALDA, SHHH, Hearing Loss magazine, etc
8. More clearly enunciated by AMPHL how the association can help potential medical students, current medical students, and physicians along the process.
9. Fundraising focus
10. If more D&HH professionals could see less discrimination leading to not having to leave their jobs/lose job due to hearing loss. If they could see the evidence of success and firmly believe things are possible, they would be more open to subscribing.
11. Organization needs to be more inclusive – especially for allied health providers as well as for non-ASL providers.
12. New faces. Find ways to keep older physicians and other professionals established in their careers. Continue mentoring for the younger generation and for people who are established, have workshops for them during conferences that pertain to their needs and interests in establishing practices, saving for retirement, tools for communication and keeping updated in technology among other things.
13. Send periodic emails to subscribers on a monthly/bimonthly basis.
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AMPHL President’s Message- September 2006
When is the next AMPHL conference? This is a question that many people are asking. AMPHL has not yet begun planning another conference, because we need to secure funding first. We had to cancel our 2003 conference due to lack of funding. We barely raised enough money in time to cover our 2005 conference. We are learning from our past mistakes, we are not going to begin planning another conference until we have at least $25,000.00 in the bank. AMPHL’s last conference in 2005 at Gallaudet cost approximately $23,500.00. Gallaudet graciously donated $10,000.00 towards our expenses, so AMPHL only had to pay $13,500.00 out of pocket. AMPHL currently has $5,000.00 in the bank right now. So we have to raise $20,000.00 to be able to afford to put on another conference. Some of that money can be generated through registration fees and exhibitor fees, but we cannot rely on that alone, experience has shown us that.
How can AMPHL raise $20,000.00? For starters, we need a new fundraising chair. AMPHL has been looking for a new fundraising chair for at least 3 years now. Despite repeated announcements that we need a new fundraising chair, no one has stepped up. While we would prefer someone with fundraising experience, it is not required. The most important qualities we need from a new fundraising chair (or co-chairs) are enthusiasm and creativity. We need someone who can figure out ways for AMPHL to make more money without it endangering our non-profit status. We need someone who can take charge of soliciting donations. In previous years, the fundraising chairs have made a list of companies to approach for donations, have sought out appropriate contact people within those companies, and then have sent out letters asking for donations. Fundraising committee members have assisted with compiling a contact list and with mailing out letters. At the very minimum, this is what we need a new fundraising chair to do: to oversee a group of committee members working on locating potential donors and then sending letters out to them.
What goes into planning a conference once funding is secured? First of all the conference chair (with the help of the conference committee) has to research potential locations and dates, and check into costs and availability of hotels/conference rooms in those cities. The conference chair then presents this information to the board for discussion and voting. Once the location and date is determined, the hard work begins. AMPHL has to publicize the conference so that people can put it on their calendars. Speakers have to be recruited by word of mouth and by releasing a call for abstracts. Food arrangements have to be made. Travel information has to be gathered. Speaker abstracts need to be sorted through and speakers notified if their abstracts have/have not been accepted for presentation at the conference. Registration forms have to be generated and processed. Potential exhibitors have to be contacted, exhibitor forms filled out, and exhibitor fees collected. Details on the number of conference rooms, hotel rooms, tables, meals, etc has to be worked out with the host hotel. Interpreter and CART services have to be arranged. Volunteers have to be recruited to run the registration booth, to be moderators, to sell AMPHL logo items, to help people try out stethoscopes on the auscultation mannequin, etc. The bottom line is that an AMPHL conference is a lot of work. It requires us to begin planning at least one or two years prior to the date of the conference. It requires many people willing to volunteer their time and efforts both prior to the conference and during the conference.
AMPHL’s current conference chair will be resigning her position later this fall, at the same time we have our annual turnover of outgoing board members/incoming newly elected board members. AMPHL needs a new conference chair. The conference chair is primarily responsible for conference planning , but also oversees efforts towards AMPHL’s informal regional get-togethers and participation at other groups’ conferences (ie panel and/or booth at SHHH, AgBell, NAD, etc). Conference committee members work closely with the conference chair on all 3 tasks.
If you are interested in being fundraising chair or conference chair, or even being co-chair of one of those 2 committees, please contact AMPHL President Candie Corriher at president@amphl.org. We are also looking for people who are interested in leading the conference committee efforts on regional get-togethers and/or participation at other groups’ conferences. These people would work under the conference chair’s direction, but would assume primary responsibility for those tasks.
AMPHL cannot grow and thrive without people behind the scenes making things happen. Most of AMPHL’s current committee chairs, officers, and directors have been a part of AMPHL since it was founded in the year 2000. It is time for some fresh faces with much enthusiasm and creativity. We encourage anyone interested in being more of a part of AMPHL in any way (committee chair, committee member, officer, director) to contact AMPHL President Candie Corriher at the email address above. As part of AMPHL’s efforts to recruit volunteers, each future issue of AMPHL PULSE will contain a list of open AMPHL positions and of committee tasks we need assistance with. Please take the time to give back to AMPHL, to assist all of those younger folks following in our footsteps as successful medical professionals and students with hearing loss.
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Starting with the next issue of PULSE, in March, we will be posting openings in AMPHL. This will include committee positions as well as board level positions. If you are aware of job openings specifically in the health professions that you think would be appropriate for a deaf/hard of hearing professional, please send those to me. Depending on the number of requests, among other things, we may start listing those as well.
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