Newsletter: May 2006
Janelle S. Taylor, Contributing Editor
SMA Student Paper Prize Competitions - 2006
The SMA announces the competition for the Rivers Undergraduate Student Paper Prize, and the Charles Hughes Graduate Student Paper Prize. The Rivers Prize recognizes the outstanding paper written by an undergraduate student; the Hughes Prize recognizes the best paper written by a graduate student. Please encourage your students to apply.
Both prizes carry a $250 cash award, and the journal Medical Anthropology Quarterly will have right of first refusal on winning manuscripts. Winners’ names will be announced at the SMA business meeting during the 2006 AAA meeting in San Jose, CA.
Papers should not exceed 20 double-spaced pages, not including bibliography, and no identifying information or acknowledgments should be contained in the manuscript. Please include a cover letter containing: (a) the paper title, (b) which competition it is being entered into (Hughes or Rivers), (c) the author’s name and student status (and the advisor’s name, if any), (d) an email address, (e) a postal mailing address and (f) a phone number. Papers must have been written while a student, in this or the preceding academic year only.
Entries must be sent electronically and must be received by June 15, 2006. Please refer to http://medanthro.net/awards/polgar.html, and address any questions to the Prize Committee Chair, Elisa (EJ) Sobo, at esobo@mail.sdsu.edu
Conference Report: VHA Meeting on “Implementing Equity”
Submitted by Elisa J. Sobo
About 550 researchers, policy makers, providers, and health care executives participated in 185 paper sessions, poster sessions, workshops, and interest group meetings at the 24th National Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Health Services Research and Development meeting (February 15-17 2006; Arlington, VA). The meeting’s theme, "Implementing Equity: Making Research Work for Diverse Veteran Populations”, was selected to reflect the VHA’s “commitment to promote effective translation of research findings into evidence-based clinical practice that specifically aim to improve the quality of care and eliminate disparities in health and healthcare for veterans”. As such, the conference dealt with many issues of interest to medical anthropologists.
The keynote address was given by Uwe Reinhardt and his son, Captain (USMC) Mark Cheng Reinhardt. Captain Reinhardt, who recently returned from duty in Iraq, spoke about the difficulties that military men and women may face when transitioning from military to civilian (including disabled civilian) life. He emphasized the importance of streamlining the transfer of healthcare from the Department of Defense (DoD) to the VHA. Dr. Reinhardt focused on economic issues. Responding to an audience question about pay-for-performance initiatives, he proposed that military leaders could have a supply of funds from which to reward comrades whenever they do something to protect each other from harm. His son thought the idea absurd: comrades support each other out of loyalty and duty—because of a moral imperative, not an economic one. Healthcare workers should do the same for the patients they care for.
The moral imperative concept was (coincidentally?) also part of a workshop on implementation research that I convened and conducted with VHA colleagues for the meeting. The workshop taught that a good way to implement change is to identify, key into, and leverage cultural values. It also introduced participants to the variety of methods that anthropologists and organizational psychologists use to research these.
Joel Kupersmith, Chief Research and Development Officer, discussed the VA's long-term vision. Some key areas for development are: polytraumatic injuries (brain injury, burns, spinal cord injury) and genomic medicine, especially in regard to the opportunity the VA has, with its nationwide electronic medical record system, for large-scale descriptive studies. Next year's meeting theme is "Improving the Quality of Care and Outcomes for Veterans with Disabilities throughout the Continuum of Care." For more information, see http://www.hsrd.research.va.gov/about/national_meeting/2006/
Vance Wins Kessler Award
Congratulations to Carole S. Vance (Columbia U) who received the 14th annual David R. Kessler Award in December 2005 in recognition of her contributions to sexuality studies, and delivered the 2005 Kessler Lecture on “Travels with Sex.” An anthropologist whose work deals with sexuality, policy, rights, science, and visual representation, Dr. Vance is associate professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and also holds appointments in Columbia’s Department of Anthropology and the Law School. For the past eight years she has directed the Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights, a Rockefeller Foundation post-doctoral residency program designed to integrate new scholarship about sexuality into advocacy and activism on rights in the U.S. and internationally. She has written many articles about controversies over female sexuality, sexual imagery, sexual panics, and sexuality and science and is the editor of Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality.
Please send column contributions to the SMA Contributing Editor, Janelle Taylor (jstaylor@u.washington.edu)