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Letter to NYSALM Membership, January 2012
Dear New York State Association of Licensed Midwives member:
Welcome to those of you who have just joined our state association for the first time! And welcome back to those of you who have supported our state organization since its birth twelve years ago!
NYSALM is proud of our legislative record over the past eleven years; with your help and that of our consumers, lobbyists, and legislators, we passed four bills in ten years! Our crowning achievement was passage of the Midwifery Modernization Act in July 2010 which removed the requirement for a written practice agreement with a physician. This year the NYSALM Board approved a “Position Statement on Planned Home Birth in New York” which supports the safety of homebirth attended by Licensed Midwives and suggests best practices both for midwives who provide homebirth services and for hospitals and health care providers who receive homebirth transports. Although we are not currently promoting any legislation, Board members have met with Jason Helgerson, the new Medicaid Director for NYS, and with representatives in the Departments of Health and Insurance on other issues of concern to midwives.
We were one of the few states that had already formed a state association well before the ACNM changed its bylaws so that every state would need to form an affiliate. We received final approved as the ACNM state affiliate for New Yorkin July 2011. As the state affiliate of ACNM, in the future all NYSALM members must also be ACNM members. ACNM has taken the responsibility of collecting dues for us. In hopes that our membership base would expand with this affiliation, we lowered our dues this year for Active members. Additionally, under the ACNM bylaws passed a few years ago, ACNM chapters no longer exist; instead, the chapters are now chapters of their state affiliate, in our case, NYSALM. We encourage the chapters to review their bylaws and any incorporation documents and bank accounts; these should be amended to reflect their new status, but we hope active chapters will continue to thrive and moribund chapters will find new energy
NYSALM is divided into six geographic regions: New York City, Long Island, Hudson Valley, Northeast, Midstate, and Western. Our bylaws provide for at least two representatives to the Board from each region. We would love to have student representation from each of the midwifery schools in our state. The Board normally meets every other month at the offices of the lobbying firm we retain in Albany, but in an effort to be more accessible to midwives around the state, this fall we met at Wilson Hospital in Johnson City (near Binghamton) on Sep 16 and in New York City at the offices of our lobbyist in the Met Life Building on Nov 18. We hope you can join us at one of our future Board meetings.
One of the benefits of being an ACNM state affiliate will be our ability to use the communications network of the College. The current outdated NYSALM website will be replaced with an affiliate micro-site as part of ACNM. We will retain our domain name www.nysalm.org, but it will redirect to the new webpage newyork.midwife.org. A list-serve of our members is also part of this system. We will still publish our semi-annual newsletter PUSH which is distributed to all legislators in Albany and electronically to all of our members; look for it this Springl. We are planning our 12th Annual Meeting for April; the program we held in Old Chatham this past April was relaxed and educational. Any ideas or help you can offer in any of these endeavors would be appreciated!
Pat Burkhardt, President Susan Rannestad, Vice-President Nancy Kraus, Treasurer Jennifer Jagger, SecretaryThe Midwifery Modernization Act is now law!
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