President's Message 2024
Dear CAA Members,
HAPPY NEW YEAR! On behalf of the CAA 2024 Board of Directors, I want to welcome you, our members, to this new year. Our organization and all that we do is for you, for us, audiologists in California. I am honored and humbled to serve as your President. I wish to express gratitude to our Founding Members, all who have served on the Board of Directors previously, and most especially all Past-Presidents who have paved the way for our influence and successes.
Before we can focus on this year ahead, I would like to acknowledge all that 2023 brought us. Our lobbyists worked tirelessly on our behalf, meeting with legislators to help protect our scope and our reimbursements. While the fruits of their labors may not have been the long-awaited dissolution of the hearing aid dispensing license for audiologists or the inclusion of hearing aid coverage for everyone, we were able to keep our profession off the radar from cuts that occurred in the California budget.
2023 brought us the most-attended conference yet, with a record 379 participants! Let’s keep that momentum for this next year. I am already looking forward to September 2024 and our Annual Conference in Irvine, where we have so much to celebrate. This conference, focusing on Uniting Audiologists, will be our 25th!
I first joined the CAA board in 2022 as the Northern California Regional Representative. My hope was to find a way to bring an audiologist who works at a VA together with an audiologist who works at a Pediatric Hospital. While driving to the conference this past September a thought about the theme for the 2024 conference struck me. In July I had proposed Uniting Audiology which was selected (mostly because it was the only submission). On that drive, I realized we do not need to unite the field but we need to unite ourselves, embrace the diversity of all specialties, and (continue to) build a community to support one another and our profession. My thought led me to change the theme for the Conference from uniting the field of audiology to uniting the audiologists.
My goal for 2024 is to bring us together, embrace the diversity in our scope, and celebrate all of the good we do. For 2024, I want to continue the momentum we gained in 2023 - not start afresh - build on the years behind us and work towards a field which practices at the top of their full scope, no matter what the specialty, no matter who the patient.
Sincerely,
Melanie Rosenblatt, Au.D., F-AAA, ABA-C
2024 CAA President
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