President's Message 2/12/22
Posted by [email protected] on May. 23, 2022 / Subscribe 0
Hello GAA! I am Dr. Lacey Sharp, the 2021-2022 GAA president. We are in need of nominations for the board and convention committee positions listed in your program (southern representative, northern representative, president elect, membership chair, social media chair). Please feel free to talk to me if you have any nominations or questions about these positions as we truly need more help!
I want to see this academy flourish, but to do that we need each of you to please spread the word about our organization. We only have 85 members and 52 attendees out of about 450 audiologists in the state. With more members and more support, we could have a multi-day convention, a larger reception, and more resources to fight against dispensers encroaching on our scope of practice.
I’d also like to remind everybody that our fiscal year starts in July and ends in June, so don’t forget to renew your membership this July. We do this in an effort to avoid having to renew along with your national organizations, and to be sure that we have enough funds to support our lobbyists over the summer.
We are excited to offer some bonus spring CEU credits this year with virtual product trainings from our wonderful platinum sponsors; we will be sending you an email with the final schedule soon! (Starkey in March, Oticon in April, Signia in May, Widex in June)
I’d like to extend a big thank you to our amazing lobbyists, Helen, Stan & George, for all that they do. They have helped us get connected with the people who can help us with all things related to audiology. The two big examples this year have been:
- Passing the Interstate compact in Georgia in May 2021 to allow for telehealth across state lines.
- OAE Law Revision: Helen and Stan helped us get in contact with pediatric audiologists on revising a law regarding OAE’s which allows us to have people other than audiologists help us screen kids via OAE’s over 3 months (instead of just under 3 months). The revision will include clearly written guidelines for OAE screening/protocols that will include the involvement of an audiologist. The point of this is to further assist kids from 3 months to 22 years who may be more appropriately assessed by OAE’s than pure tone screening based off their development.
I am also very excited to announce that GAA has recently written a letter of support for the proposed UGA AuD program. We are very hopeful for the possibility of an in state doctoral program where there is a respected and well established undergraduate communication and sciences disorders program!
If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to email me. Thank you again for all your support!
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