I am glad that Ms. Barnett is planning a nationwide search to fill these positions and only hope that that can be accomplished soon. We have had too many leadership voids over the last decade at DOH and at AHA to delay these things any longer. All of that being said, there is perhaps one thing that can help us through such difficult times, which hopefully will be over once we install new leadership at DOH, and that is a good road map. Personnel may come and go in various capacities, which is bad enough, but if we don't even have a sense of where we are and where we need to go we will have nothing to make our plans by and no means of measuring our progress. Then we all sit down in what are usually a few long, painful, serious, involved meetings, and hash out our spending priorities for the next year.
Every year sees more tinkering, more refiguring, more responsiveness to changes in the epidemic.
In short, we are doing what we need to do to continue to respond to this epidemic in a constructive fashion. This process, however, involves just the federal money we are gettting. In that process, there also must be a very genuine commitment to involving the communities affected by this disease and not just involving service providers who might or might not have vested interests in their funding streams. I don't mean to bash service providers, in fact I have a very high opinion of most of the people involved in these difficult and trying efforts, but the voices of the people trying to stay alive every day with this disease need to be heard and this process must be designed to bring their opinions into consideration. Beyond all the heated rhetoric of the the current political campaigns going on this year are real people, with real needs, and the best thing we can do for people is to disregard the rhetoric and get to work on making ours a government that actually functions and meets their needs.