Enhancing Access & Effective Care at IPS: The MH Services Conference

It’s been just a few short months since APA’s Annual Meeting in San Diego, and already it’s time to gear up for one of my favorite events of the year, IPS: The Mental Health Services Conference.

The theme of this year’s meeting is “Enhancing Access & Effective Care,” and APA’s Division of Education and the Scientific Program Committee have worked together on a fantastic offering of courses and sessions for attendees. The meeting will take place in New Orleans from October 19 to 22, with the goal of training and supporting psychiatrists and other mental health professionals to provide quality care and leadership in the field.

The Annual Meeting is like the Super Bowl of psychiatry in the United States. It does so many things well and simultaneously. There are fantastic educational courses and sessions, captivating speakers, and groundbreaking research shared by colleagues from all over the world. The Annual Meeting is a mammoth event; IPS by comparison has a completely different feel, much more intimate. The great work by our APA Division of Education staff carries over to the IPS, but the focus is narrowed considerably, making it easy to plan your day around the sessions you want to attend.

The Division of Education has done a great job organizing the content of the meeting into tracks so that attendees can easily make the most of their time at the meeting. They include Addiction Psychiatry, Administrative Psychiatry, Community Psychiatry, Integrated and Collaborative Care, and Psychopharmacology. The Technology track will emphasize how EHRs, telepsychiatry, and mental health apps are changing the way we practice medicine and the best ways to implement the high-tech tools psychiatrists have at their disposal.

While networking opportunities abound at the Annual Meeting, the smaller, more intimate setting of IPS gives you the chance to really get to know some of your colleagues and forge lasting relationships. Many people who come to the IPS are repeat attendees who are really invested in the content of the meeting. For me, IPS represents the heart and soul of public and community psychiatry. Those who attend are passionate about doing their best to deliver the highest quality, evidence-based treatments and services possible.

Attending a meeting can be a great way to combat burnout as well. Stressors at our jobs can often have a big impact on both our work and home lives, leading to feelings of compassion fatigue and general exhaustion. Meeting with and talking to colleagues who face many of the same challenges in their day-to-day lives can be a great way to relieve that stress and really restore that collegial spirit that is so important to being satisfied at work.

Addressing physician burnout is one of the priorities for my presidential year, and with that in mind, IPS will have sessions on that very topic. The Medical Director’s Bootcamp, one of this year’s Learning Labs, will address burnout as well as a range of other topics, including negotiating and working with special populations. I’m very excited about seeing what this and other Learning Labs have to offer at IPS.

One of the goals of IPS is to train attendees to be effective leaders in the field. Leadership is such an important quality for a psychiatrist to have, especially as we move into the era of integrated care, where psychiatrists will work alongside primary care physicians as experts in the mental health of our patients. That is why I am especially excited to see U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (Ret.), who will speak at the Opening Session of IPS. Lt. Gen. Hertling will discuss how psychiatrists can enhance our leadership role in care systems today and into the future. He is the author of the 2016 book Growing Physician Leaders.

I am so excited to be attending this year’s IPS as president of APA and to see how all the individual pieces coalesce into the robust, impactful meeting that has kept me coming back every year for the last 20 years. I hope you’ll join me and many of your other colleagues in New Orleans in October for what is sure to be one of the best psychiatric events of the year. ■