Outgoing ASHA President Sue T. Hale, MCD, urged the retraction last month in a letter that she sent to Michael D. Maves, MD, MBA, the AMA's executive vice president and CEO. Hale wrote Maves to convey ASHA's overall comments about the AMA's position.
"ASHA takes issue with the presumption of the AMA that it should develop such a document and especially for the stated purpose to 'serve as a resource for state medical associations, national medical specialty societies, and policymakers,'" Hale wrote. "One profession does not have the right to restrict the scope of practice of another legally recognized profession."
ASHA reports that it also took issue with several other aspects of the scope of practice document, including:
- that the AMA developed its document without "conferring or collaborating with ASHA, the professional home for the discipline [audiology] since 1925";according to Hale, "such oversight begs the question as to the actual motives behind such a self-serving document and will most assuredly cause reasonable policymakers to doubt its credibility."
- parts of the AMA document that suggest that advocacy to expand audiology's scope of practice is politically motivated;"the profession of audiology has been a standards-based profession for over 50 years," Hale wrote, adding that "scopes of practice legitimately grow as a profession's research and knowledge base increases."
- Hale pointed out that "asserting that effective patient care is best accomplished by means of physician oversight is not a cost-effective argument," noting that "approximately 95% of adults with complaints of hearing loss have sensorineural hearing loss for which medical or surgical treatment is not typically beneficial";she added that the AMA "assumes a level of audiologic knowledge that does not exist for most physicians and presumes a model of health care that does not reflect society's acceptance of autonomous allied health practitioners."
SOURCE: ASHA.
