Note: The following message was e-mailed to interest group members on April 15, 2005.

Many of you by now are about to attend or have attended regional meetings. I trust that advising in the health professions was one of the many sessions or workshops. Your daily newspapers, television, magazine and journal articles focus regularly on some health care issue or medical issue whether they are new problems, new discoveries, new treatments. So we cannot fail to continue to discuss some of these that are most helpful to academic advising.

It is already time to think about our annual national meeting in Las Vegas and what we would like to have our Health Professions Advising Interest Group discuss. With this in mind, I’d like to formulate a committee to work with me to make that meeting valuable and to see to it that workshops are presented that shed light on some of these concerns. If I could get one or two members from each region from this Interest Group who will volunteer, we could get started now in determining meaningful agenda items. We will do most of our discussion by e-mail and phone. So here is my call to arms to ask you to volunteer!! If any of you are also members of the National Association of Advisors of the Health Professions, this would be useful information to me and we could look at cross exchange of resources.

Registration information for the national conference in Las Vegas can be found on the NACADA web site at www.nacada.ksu.edu/NationalConf/2005/index.htm.

From last year, I learned that members wanted to discuss more and bring up questions encountered in their advising settings. In addition, there was and is a need to discuss the critical demands in the other health fields, i.e., nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, and public health, to name a few. With the committee, we could perhaps develop new approaches to these areas, identify additional resources and make our meeting knowledgeable and interactive. If you have garnered information from your Regional meetings that you deem should be shared, please communicate that to me.

If you have ideas for additional resources to be added to the Health Professions Advising Interest Group Resources web page at www.nacada.ksu.edu/InterestGroups/C20/resources.htm, please contact me with that information as well.

I shall be awaiting your eager responses to my call for action! Please let me hear from all of you who would like to participate in making advising in the health professions a quality experience in Las Vegas and in advising for the next academic year.

Sincerely,

Ruby S. Mason
Chair, NACADA Health Professions Advising Interest Group

Senior Advising Consultant
Chief Health Professions Advisor
Undergraduate Advising Programs
Sweet Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-3085
earsm@stanford.edu