Mid-Atlantic Regional Chapter

Officers:

President: Margot L. Waitz, D.O.
Past-President: Lisa Barkley, M.D.
President-Elect:
Vice President: Jodi Brady-Olympia
Secretary/Treasurer: Tahniat Syed, M.D., MPH

History and Mission:

In 1974, Dr. Clyde Rapp founded the Delaware Valley Society for Adolescent Health in recognition of the need for a local society dedicated to the care of adolescents. Over the years, the society evolved and in 1994, was "reactivated" into its current incarnation: The Mid-Atlantic Society for Adolescent Health. This Regional Chapter of the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine serves Delaware, Southeastern Pennsylvania, and Southern New Jersey. Our 225 active members come from a wide variety of medical and non-medical disciplines. Recruiting and maintaining an interdisciplinary membership is considered a priority.

Our goals and objectives include:

To foster communication among those concerned with Adolescent Health.
To develop and promulgate standards and recommendations for adolescent health care.
To develop educational programs.
To improve the quality of and access to health care for adolescents.
To identify, investigate, and list opportunities for careers in adolescent health.

Highlights of recent chapter activities include:

In May, 2001 - We joined with St. Christopher's Hospital and the Philadelphia Pediatric Society to welcome Dr. Iris Litt, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Adolescent Health to Philadelphia for the Waldo Nelson Lecture in Pediatrics. Dr. Litt's talk was entitled, "Adolescence - The Crossroads Between Biology and Society." Following the lecture, several Mid-Atlantic Chapter Members joined Dr. Litt and others for dinner.
The fall- 2001 education program was entitled "Mind, Body, and Spirit: Preventative and Acute Needs of Children and Adolescents." This two-day conference was held at the Lehigh Valley Hospital. Several chapter members participated as guest lecturers. The audience was very interested in adolescent health and asked great questions about caring for teens.
The spring - 2002 symposium, "Preparing Pediatricians for Their Role in the Mental Health System," took place on April 10, 2002 at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The one-day symposium highlighted resident training in advocacy for children and adolescents and provided a forum to discuss different approaches to advocate for youth. This program was sponsored by the Anne E. Dyson Community Pediatrics Initiative and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Community-Based Pediatrics and Advocacy Program (CPAP). Following the meeting, the Mid-Atlantic Chapter attendees had a dinner meeting to discuss future programs for the chapter. These include a fall program for 2002 focusing on coding and billing procedures for Adolescent Medicine. We are also beginning to plan our spring 2003 chapter event on medical needs of adolescent young women to be held in Hershey, Pa.

List Serve:

A listserve was created for our chapter at Topica. Thus far, the listserve has been used mainly to post chapter events, however, questions and discussions on adolescent topics would be very welcome. To post a message on the Topica listserve send an email to samlist@topica.com. The Topica website is: www.topica.com. To subscribe to the Topica listserve, send an email to samlist-subscribe@topica.com, or email our secretary Nadja Peter at peter@email.chop.edu. For Mid-Atlantic Regional Chapter membership information please contact: Nadja Peter at the above email address.