It will help them spread the word to the academic departments and research labs that APA is the place to be for psychological science. Psychological practice continues to face the challenges of a changing health care industry. Psychology practices are suffering from intrusive management and competition from other professionals. The Practice Directorate is addressing the problems facing practice with a multi-pronged strategy of legislative and regulatory advocacy, litigation, aid to states, and education of practitioners and multiple publics. I particularly applaud the efforts of the Directorate to engage in cooperative projects, such as the intervention program with breast cancer patients with Blue Cross, which demonstrate the value of psychology to the health care community.
Psychological interventions are effective and are cost-saving in the long run.
We have the data to back up these claims and we need to continue to take this message to the health care community. Although it has been misconstrued in some quarters, I believe that the Empirically Supported Psychotherapies project of the Clinical Psychology Division helps to make the point to the health care world that psychology can point to data on effectiveness of treatment and can provide effective services for a wide variety of problems in living. We need to promote our effectiveness and use our research to demonstrate the empirical support for our interventions. In the area of education I have been particularly interested in recent years in the continuing education and in bringing graduate curricula up to date to deal with new developments in research and practice. I believe we need to improve our system of making CE available to psychologists to update their skills.