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Strategic Plan

In January’s letter, I presented my view of a worthy goal for the New Year, for CPNP members to launch a global war on mental illness. This month, I am pleased to announce that CPNP’s newly completed strategic plan provides the vision, mission and value statements to lead us into battle! 

“CPNP envisions a world where every individual with a psychiatric or neurologic disorder has a care team that includes a neuropsychiatric pharmacist accountable for optimal medication therapy.” Our new mission statement seeks to advance the reach and practice of neuropsychiatric pharmacists and aspiring neuropsychiatric pharmacists. CPNP’s new vision and mission statements were conceived through dialogue with hard-working CPNP committees, brainstorming on the part of CPNP’s Board and staff, and consideration of CPNP’s strengths and the evolving healthcare climate. Collectively, we realized that focusing our efforts on elevating the knowledge and skills of neuropsychiatric pharmacists and working toward extending our reach through practice excellence that includes provider status would be the best way for CPNP to serve patients and families living with mental illness. 

CPNP is actively allocating resources to better serve neuropsychiatric pharmacists through projects that emphasize core values of synergy, giving, progress and excellence.

Over the next three years, we will focus our resources on five core goals that have the potential to transform the organization and the specialty. We will invest in:

  1. Our Profession: We will actively promote inclusion of neuropsychiatric pharmacists as an important component of the health care team in improving outcomes for those living with mental illness.
  2. Our Expertise: We will advance our various educational products to remain innovative and to provide the best value to our members.
  3. Our Organization: We will maintain a fiscally and operationally effective organization as well as cultivate new leaders, improve committee structures, and enhance the member and volunteer experience through involvement and participation.
  4. Our Membership: We will focus on connecting members with the peers and resources most important to them.
  5. Our Voice: We will improve our visibility by establishing the Mental Health Clinician (MHC) as a respected peer-reviewed journal.

MHC Transition

The Mental Health Clinician is on its way to becoming an all peer-reviewed, practice-based journal with improved visibility and recognition outside of cpnp.org. Thanks to the hard work of the MHC’s editorial board and CPNP’s Director of Technology Greg Payne, the transition to an external publisher, Allen Press, will be complete by 2015. In order to focus on quality and keep publishing costs in line, there will be 6 issues per year instead of 12. In 2015, every article will have clickable references (when possible), and will be made available as a PDF. At that point, the next step will be to work toward indexing services. The voice of CPNP members will be heard loud and clear through increasing prominence of its journal. 

Communities

Networking rises to the top as one of the most valuable components of a CPNP membership. Roundtables at the AM have provided space and a forum for sharing information and perspectives but what about the rest of the year? In order to provide a home for like-minded individuals to connect on topics they care about, CPNP is in the process of establishing member-driven, web-based “Communities”. Each community will be given a workspace to facilitate document sharing and communication. CPNP members can join or leave a community at any time. A new community application can be submitted by a single member but it must be endorsed by at least 10 members to be established with two of these members designated as leaders. New communities will be promoted in the “Opportunities for Involvement” notices for 3 months. Look for more information in the near future and think about what community you may want to initiate.

Forum on our Future

Communication is key to a successful organization and we want to hear from you! To this end, CPNP has transformed Wednesday’s Town Hall into a new format with planned topics, discussants, and time for an open forum where anything goes. The forum will still serve as our annual business meeting where members can learn about the State of CPNP, including financials and details of our new strategic plan. A slideshow will silently present this information while members get breakfast. The Forum will be conducted around four, fifteen minute discussions:

  1. Provider status and CMM led by Carla Cobb and Carey Potter
  2. Opioid abuse/buprenorphine clinics led by Ray Love
  3. PGY-2 residency standards led by Bob Haight and Chris Thomas
  4. Open Forum

The goal of this new format is to engage members in topics of high priority to our membership. Make plans to participate in this session; it’s sure to stir the fire in your belly! I’m looking forward to seeing you all in Arizona in just two short months!

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