AAPA Conference

[Kcooper]

So this is my first time going to the conference and I have a silly question..

What does everybody wear usually? I’ve been assuming business casual, but somebody told me to just wear scrubs so now I’m questioning it..

[MediMike]

36 minutes ago, Kcooper said:

So this is my first time going to the conference and I have a silly question..

What does everybody wear usually? I’ve been assuming business casual, but somebody told me to just wear scrubs so now I’m questioning it..

I think biz cas is the best idea 

[TeddyRucpin]

Scrub top with khakis; party on top + business on the bottom.

Edited May 5, 2022 by TeddyRucpin

[CAAdmission]

Golf shirt and khakis. You can get away with nice jeans, too. 

[LKPAC]

casual and comfortable.  PAs are cool!  

Edited May 5, 2022 by LKPAC

[jmj11]

Cosplay

 

[sas5814]

wear whatever you want to wear. you paid to be there.

When I was schmoozing I was in a suit. When I was chilling I was in khaki shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and leather sandals. What is anyone going to do? Make you change?

[NeoTrion]

I actually had this same question since I am a delegate this year.

[rev ronin]

I wore slacks and a dress shirt, no tie, to HOD today and did not feel underdressed.

[rev ronin]

So who all is here in Indianapolis and wants to meet up with other PA Forums folks?  I will be at the PAFT reception Monday (free food!) and the DEI reception Tuesday.

[rev ronin]

My thoughts on the HOD process and HOD transparency.

 

As many of you know, I am associated with a couple of different constituent organizations and volunteer on an AAPA commission. This was my first opportunity to observe, and participate in, the AAPA House of Delegates. None of those affiliations are secret, but I’m not going to name them as they aren’t particularly germane to my impressions of the HOD work and flow. Some thoughts, for those of you who haven’t seen how it works:

 

* The actual business is broken up into three parts: General session 1, reference committees, and general session 2. In general session 1, all the resolutions—which are published weeks (a month?) in advance are considered, and anything that’s not contested is approved; anything contested is “extracted” into a reference committee. Lots of motions sailed through unopposed on the “consent agenda,” generally because they were understandable solutions to understandable issues.

 

* Reference committees are made up of half a dozen volunteers; similar topics may be combined in a reference committee, but the idea is that the committee is responsible for hearing the disputes, weighing the testimony pro and con, and hearing proposed amendments. These are not voted on at the time, but taken under advisement by the committees, who bring back recommendations for general session 2. Any fellow member has the right to speak to any motion during the reference committee hearings, but only delegates get to vote on business, which is done during the two general sessions... but mostly general session 2.

 

* General session 2 is where parliamentary procedure comes into play. I watched a state delegate preempt a student academy attempt to insert a ‘religious belief’ exemption for Covid-19 vaccinations (a topic many of you know I care deeply about) that had been introduced out of order, by calling the question so it was never actually introduced.

 

* This year, the electronic voting did not work, so everything was done by voice vote, sometimes backed up by physical counting of the delegates, who stood to be counted on a particular question. It was a pretty low-tech solution, and for the vast majority of voice votes, it would have been impossible to say who voted for or against what. It could have been reasonable to record the room and see who voted for or against what, but not a lot of things were even close.

 

* Of the actual votes, the vast majority were procedural: postpone this, table that, refer this to such-and-such a working group (i.e., bring it back next year).

 

* LOTS of the decisions and proposals were right-brained—and that’s me being charitable. There were some impassioned pleas. There was one delegate who was allowed to go on in significant detail and well over the 5 minute limit about how she had lost her toddler to button battery ingestion: a truly tragic and moving tale... but the resolution was never in question, and I may be mistaken but I think it was “pulled” to allow that PA delegate the floor to recount her family’s horror story. In multiple cases, the commission I was part of had spent months combining redundant policy statements, carefully wordsmithing the replacement statement, and recommended expiring or superseding the redundant policies... only to have someone state an unsupported reason for the obsolete policy should be retained, and it always was.

 

So, for those of you who don’t remember, in my past life I rewrote Information Security policies for a Fortune 100 company three times over ~11 years. That was pretty straightforward in comparison to this, because decisions were made considering all the moving parts at once, so we could make a bunch of changes at once, and only had to convince one oversight committee. If a question was raised, we’d figure it out and come back in two weeks or a month, NOT a whole year. The HOD is like an oversight committee of 400-odd people. Consider that the AAPA has almost as many legislative branch decision makers as the U.S. Federal Government, and is larger than any state legislature except New Hampshire (WHY?). At the HOD, you simply don’t get consistent answers to multi-part questions. 100% of the positive changes my commission proposed passed, but less than 50% of the policy expiration/retirements we proposed were upheld.

 

On the plus side, the house officers were very good at explaining what was going on for any given motion or vote. It was a very newbie-friendly event.

 

If I were going to make recommendations for the house officers, it would be to be more aggressive about making sure that end-of-life motions are, in fact, end-of-life’d when a replacement policy is proposed, and emphasizing that whatever residual wording or what not needed to go into the new policy. This isn’t about the content of the policies, except that when you have a dozen different policies addressing the same things, redundancy abounds.

[sas5814]

Great explanation Rev. I think the way the HOD is structured and function goes a long way towards explaining why it is such a tortuous process to make any significant changes.

[CAAdmission]

I was in the HOD for a long time. I finally got fed up when I noted a very small party of people - mostly people with AAPA BOD experience - with a strong knowledge of parliamentary procedure could repeatedly game the system to achieve pretty much any desired outcome.