360 Degree advocacy: a model for high impact advocacy in a rapidly changing healthcare marketplace.

In an era of rapid changes in the healthcare marketplace the specialty of clinical neuropsychology faces a substantial increase in advocacy challenges. These include maintaining both access to services and a favorable practice climate as new healthcare structures and payment models evolve. The issue of regional variability complicates an effective response to these challenges from national professional organizations. One response to the challenge of regional variability is to strengthen our national organizations' capacity to engage in coordinated and effective advocacy, and to partner with state and regional neuro/psychological associations. The Inter-Organizational Practice Committee (IOPC) was formed in 2012 to meet this need. The IOPC has developed a model of 360 Degree Advocacy that coordinates local, regional, and national resources for high-impact, efficient advocacy. This paper describes the 360 Degree Advocacy model, and walks readers through an example of the model in action, successfully responding to a threat to patient access and practice climate with a regional Medicare carrier.

Improving the clinical utility of the SIRS cognitive items: preliminary reliability, validity, and normative data in pretrial and clinical samples.

The utility of the Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms [SIRS; Rogers, R., Bagby, R. M., & Dickens, S. E. (1992). Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms professional manual. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources], Improbable Failure Rate (IF) scale in pretrial (N=64) and clinical (N=153) samples was explored. Internal consistencies of the IF items were alpha=.81 and alpha=.92, respectively, with split-half reliabilities of .89 and .84, respectively. The IF scale loaded distinctly from the SIRS primary (psychosis) scales in principal components analysis, and the pattern of performances among clinical groups were as expected (e.g., normal controls outperformed patients with focal lesions and dementia, CHI patients outperformed dementia patients). Performance on the IF items was correlated with MMSE score (r=-.59, p