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in this issue...
 Message to the Obama Transition Team—Waving the Flag for Behavioral Research
Science Staff Meets with President-Elect’s NSF Transition Team
Friends of NIAAA Meet at APA HQ and Psychologists Join Advisory Council
NIMH Workgroup Releases Report on Training Next Generation of Researchers
Studying the Psychology of Terrorism
Disaster Mental Health Recommendations Released
FDA Considers Quality/Usefulness of Information Supplied to Consumers
Thousands Attend NIH Summit on Eliminating Health Disparities
Message to the Obama Transition Team—Waving the Flag for Behavioral Research
It is not an easy job to get the ear of the overworked public servants who are laying the groundwork for a new Administration with new personnel and new policies. APA, like many other associations, wants to ensure that the transition personnel, and the incoming Administration, understand the issues that behavioral scientists are dealing with, and see how behavioral research may help them reach their policy goals. (See Heather Kelly’s related report about transition issues in the National Science Foundation.)
APA has been involved in the development of several key overview pieces that have gone to the incoming Administration. Howard Silver, Executive Director of the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), in which APA is the largest member, transmitted this document to the president-elect the day after the election. It gives a broad overview of several issues of concern to the behavioral and social sciences. (APA’s Executive Director for Science Steve Breckler represents APA on COSSA’s executive committee.)
Geoff Mumford of the Science Government Relations Office provided content and helped polish the overview document on substance abuse research and policy that came from the Friends of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. See his report here.
As an active member of several coalitions on health and science issues, APA has added its voice to documents on health care reform and funding for public health research agencies.
- The Ad Hoc Group for Medical Research Funding lobbies for an enhanced budget for the National Institutes of Health. Here is the letter sent to the transition team.
- APA also participates in the CDC Coalition, which sent this letter to the Obama Transition team to request that the new Administration place a high priority on CDC’s public health mission by providing additional resources for the agency in its first budget request for FY2010.
- The Campaign for Public Health sent an important public health focused letter to congressional leaders as well as the incoming Obama Administration. The letter calls for increased investment in the public health infrastructure and the CDC. More than 120 organizations, including APA, signed on.
- APA is urging quick action on health care reform. See this group letter, which makes the point that economic recovery requires action on health care.
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Science Staff Meets with President-Elect’s NSF Transition Team
President-Elect Obama has tasked his transition team with reviewing each of the federal agencies to get a jump start before the new Administration gets officially underway in January. At stake are the FY2009 and FY2010 budgets, as well as potential economic stimulus package options – all of which Congress and the new executive branch team will need to hash out in the early months of 2009.
A panel of four comprised the transition review team looking at the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) programs, and Science GRO staff requested a meeting with the team at the conclusion of their official review mid-December. APA’s Steve Breckler (Executive Director for Science) and Heather Kelly (Science GRO) headed out to NSF on December 15 to meet with team co-chairman Henry Rivera and team member Michelle McMurray. Although the President-Elect has asked review teams not to share their short-term conclusions about agencies, APA used the opportunity to stress the importance of supporting NSF’s primary mission of supporting basic research and education in math, engineering and science, including the behavioral and social sciences. We urged the new Administration to honor the present executive and legislative branches’ increased commitment to NSF’s overall research budget, and to ensure that this includes strong support for the behavioral and social sciences in order to address national challenges through a better understanding of human behavior.
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Friends of NIAAA Meet at APA HQ and Psychologists Join Advisory Council
The Friends of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) met at APA headquarters on December 15 to organize activities for the next Congress and the new Administration. Tom Donaldson, President of the National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (NOFAS), volunteered to coordinate the compilation of the coalition’s written testimony for the Labor Health and Human Services Subcommittees of the House and Senate Committees on Appropriations.
APA staffers Geoff Mumford and Anne Bettesworth will be coordinating the third Friends of NIAAA educational briefing on Capitol Hill, the focus of which will likely be alcohol use and pregnancy. The briefing will be scheduled for April to coincide with Alcohol Awareness Month.
In a follow-up note, last February APA submitted nominations for openings on the National Advisory Council on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and we’re pleased to report that three psychologists, APA Fellow Dr. Linda Spear, APA Member Dr. Andrew Heath and Dr. Edward Riley have been added to the advisory council and will begin their terms of service at the February meeting. They will join APA Fellow Dr. Peter Monti, whose term of service ends in 2009, and follow APA Fellow Dr. Ken Sher, whose term just ended. The full roster and links to Council agendas and minutes is available here.
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NIMH Workgroup Releases Report on Training Next Generation of Researchers
The National Advisory Mental Health Council (NAMHC) Workgroup on Research Training released a report, Investing in the Future, on November 1 that advises NIMH on opportunities for attaining a workforce by 2020 with knowledge and expertise that will enhance the research mission of the Institute. The NIMH mission is more narrowly defined than in years passed with a greater focus on mental illness. As stated in its new Strategic Plan, NIMH’s objective is to “transform the understanding and treatment of mental illnesses through basic and clinical research, paving the way for prevention, recovery and cure.”
NIMH Director, Dr. Tom Insel, charged the workgroup with advising the NAHMC on the Institute’s investment in research training and to offer specific recommendations about how NIMH “could better achieve its goals of recruiting, training, and retaining a workforce capable of integrating novel technologies and approaches across multiple levels of analysis in its NIMH-relevant research.”
In its report, the workgroup encourages the Institute to make changes to its portfolio in order to meet the needs of a new generation of health researchers. The report offers nine recommendations to help NIMH achieve its goal of recruiting and retaining an exceptional health research workforce.
One of the recommendations is to refocus current funding in order to free up funds for other initiatives. As an example, the workgroup recommends that NIMH discontinue its support of professional associations for training interdisciplinary investigators (through the T32 mechanism) because analyses showed that the additional training and mentoring “did not provide any detectable added value” with respect to NIMH’s measured outcome - the proportion of trainees who applied for or received NIH funding. Funding from other federal agencies or private foundations was not included in the measured outcome. Several professional associations, including the American Psychological Association, the Society for Neuroscience, the American Sociological Association, and the Council for Social Work Education are already slated to lose their Minority Fellowship Programs, which are funded through the T32 grant mechanisms. The end result is a diminished investment in the behavioral research pipeline at a time when mentorship and professional networking are critical.
The workgroup’s other recommendations include targeting support to MD/PhD students; maintaining the NIMH budget for research training and career development at its current level; expanding support for systematic research training/education opportunities at NIMH-supported centers; implementing best practices for institutional training; assessing and monitoring programs; and strengthening dissemination and communication with the extramural research community.
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Studying the Psychology of Terrorism
On December 15, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence based at the University of Maryland, launched the Terrorism Studies Syllabi Repository. The repository currently contains 154 undergraduate, 56 graduate, and 1 K-12 syllabi relevant to the study of terrorism and responses to terrorism. Of those, a search on “psychology” returned 15 undergraduate and 4 graduate syllabi. The Web interface for the repository allows visitors to search by instructor name, course level, discipline, or one of 36 discrete keywords. Each syllabus is available for download in PDF format.
Requests to have a syllabus included in the repository should be directed to: education@start.umd.edu.
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Disaster Mental Health Recommendations Released
On November 18, the Disaster Mental Health Subcommittee of the National Biodefense Science Board released a report detailing its recommendations to mitigate the mental and behavioral health consequences of disasters. The report was commissioned in response to Homeland Security Presidential Directive 21, which called for the establishment of an advisory body to provide recommendations to the Secretary of Health and Human Services for “protecting, preserving, and restoring individual and community mental health in catastrophic health event settings, including pre-event, intra-event, and post-event education, messaging, and interventions.”
APA responded to a call for nominations to the working group in April 2008 and half of the invited experts were, in fact, APA members. The strategies identified by the Subcommittee cut across three main content areas: applying appropriate interventions; educating and training service providers; and enhancing and targeting communications and messaging. The report provides background on each of these areas followed by eight specific recommendations, the second of which is to enhance the research agenda for disaster mental and behavioral health. The full report is available here.
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FDA Considers Quality/Usefulness of Information Supplied to Consumers
On December 16, the Food and Drug Administration released a report indicating that consumer medical information (CMI) failed to meet the minimum criteria for usefulness that had been mandated by congress in 1996.
A press release accompanying the report stated, “CMI has been defined as being useful if it includes scientifically accurate, unbiased information that is presented in an understandable and legible format. Specifically, CMI should include the drug name and uses, how to monitor for improvement in the condition being treated, contraindications (situations when the medicine should not be used), symptoms of serious or frequent adverse reactions and what to do, and certain general information, including statements encouraging patients to talk to their health care professional.”
CMI will be the focus of a February meeting of the FDA Risk Communication Advisory Committee (RCAC), chaired by APA Fellow Baruch Fischhoff. Asked to comment about the role of the RCAC following the release of the report, Fischhoff said "I am grateful that the Congress and FDA have created the Risk Communication Advisory Committee, as a vehicle for helping to ensure that the public receives scientifically sound communications regarding the risks and benefits of the many products that FDA regulates. Because of the budgetary and regulatory limits on its ability to conduct research on its own, FDA places great value on the research conducted by the basic research community. FDA is fortunate to have, on staff, psychologists and other social scientists, who can identify and apply the best available science.”
SPIN readers interested in keeping up with RCAC activities should visit its website. Across the three meetings held in 2008, the committee reviewed: the basics of FDA's regulatory framework and ongoing communication activities with a focus on food recalls; direct-to-consumer advertising targeting various populations; and the quality of research used to communicate risk/benefit information.
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Thousands Attend NIH Summit on Eliminating Health Disparities
The NIH Summit: The Science of Eliminating Health Disparities brought together current and former leaders in research and public health to help educate scientists and community members alike about the progress NIH and communities have made since Congress established the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities in 2000. John Ruffin was joined by former NIH Directors Harold Varmus and Bernadine Healey, as well as former HHS Secretary Louis Sullivan, former Surgeon General David Satcher and the Acting Director of NIH, Raynard Kington, in recognizing the challenge of making the elimination of health disparities a priority across NIH.
Nearly 4,000 participants were registered for the conference, and Maya Angelou challenged the participants to look at the issue from the positive perspective of achieving health equity for all, rather than focus on disparities, which has a negative connotation. Psychologists from NIH and across the country joined nearly 300 other presenters at the summit to share their research and experiences, including current BSA member Vickie Mays from the UCLA School of Public Health and APA members James Jackson, Director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and Brian Smedley, Vice President and Director of the Health Policy Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
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About SPIN
APA's Science Government Relations Office (GRO) wants you to know about the important policy issues that involve psychological science at the national level. The Science GRO staff advocate for psychological science not only with members of Congress, but also with the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, Education, Justice, and with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and National Science Foundation. To keep you up-to-date regarding science policy within these agencies and on Capitol Hill, Science GRO staff write various articles and publish them monthly in an electronic newsletter called Science Policy Insider News (SPIN).
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Questions?
If you have any questions regarding SPIN or specific science policy issues, please feel free to contact any of APA's Science GRO staff.
Geoff Mumford, PhD
Assistant Executive Director for Science Policy
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Pat Kobor
Senior Science Policy Analyst
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Heather O'Beirne Kelly, PhD
Senior Legislative and Federal Affairs Officer
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Karen Studwell, JD
Senior Legislative and Federal Affairs Officer
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Elizabeth Hoffman, PhD
Legislative and Federal Affairs Officer
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Anne Bettesworth
Science Policy Associate
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Kirk Waldroff
Science Website Manager
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Tammy Barnes
Administrative Coordinator
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