“I want to help women AMA members to be recognized for all that they do in medicine,” psychiatrist Claudia Reardon, M.D., chair of the AMA Women Physicians Congress, told Psychiatric News. “I think that women may not be as good at promoting ourselves and each other as we could be. Every year the AMA and groups within the AMA give out awards to physicians, and I want to help promote our female members for those awards so that women physicians get the recognition they deserve.”

The Women Physicians Congress is one of several groups within the AMA organized to represent distinct groups of physicians. Elected chair of the congress last year, Reardon said she hopes to raise the profile of women physicians in the AMA and amplify their voice in the House of Delegates.

September was Women in Medicine Month, an annual event begun by the AMA in 1990. In honor of the month, the congress posted a variety of resources that could be used by doctors in their offices and institutions—fliers, posters, and videos of women physicians—on the social networking site Pinterest (http://pinterest.com/amermedicalassn).

Reardon also hopes to make the Women Physicians Congress more involved in the House of Delegates. At last year’s AMA Annual Meeting, the congress’s support was instrumental in passing a resolution by the House of Delegates on “HPV Vaccine and Cervical Cancer Prevention Worldwide.”

“We worked closely with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Women’s Association in writing that resolution, which asks that our AMA support the recommendations of the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices for HPV vaccination,” she said. “This means that the AMA now encourages that some groups of males, in addition to some groups of females, receive this vaccine.”

Reardon is one of a dozen or more young psychiatrists who are bringing a new energy to the AMA. And she is one of many psychiatrists of all ages who have assumed leadership positions in the House of Delegates, making psychiatry among the most potent voices at the AMA. Reardon is also active in APA. She is is a member of the Psychiatric News Editorial Advisory Board, the APA Council on Communications, and deputy representative to the APA Assembly from the Wisconsin Psychiatric Association.

“The AMA is organized medicine at its largest level,” Reardon told Psychiatric News. “It is important for psychiatrists to work together with physicians across the specialties, because if we can get physicians in other specialties to take seriously the issues around care for seriously mentally ill individuals, we can be far more powerful than advocating only among our own ranks.