Richard Talbott, who retired as Dean of the Covey College of Allied Health Professions at the University of South Alabama, died over the Memorial Day weekend. He served as President of ASAHP in 2011-2013. His duties back then included guiding a seamless transition in 2012 entailing the retirement of the Association’s executive director to the hiring of a successor for that position and moving the organization’s headquarters to another location in Washington, DC.
Important activities undertaken during his period of leadership were both of an internal and external nature. Internally, he launched a revision of the Association’s Strategic Plan and used his parliamentary skills to modify the Policy & Procedures Manual. He helped plan the ASAHP Leadership Development Program that would be offered in 2013. He implemented a new Interdisciplinary Research Award to finance a means of positioning new scholars to seek larger extramural grants. He also oversaw a conversion to using a commercial firm to perform logistical duties electronically for an ever-growing number of new manuscript submissions to the Journal of Allied Health.
Externally, in 2012 he represented ASAHP in the newly established Institute of Medicine (IOM) Global Forum on Innovation in Health Professional Education. The purpose of this endeavor was to engage key organizations in discussions to illuminate contemporary health profession education issues and create a mechanism to incubate and review new ideas. He worked with representatives of the Association of Specialized and Professional Accreditors to discuss how to formalize and enhance communication between that organization and ASAHP. Common topics of interest included interprofessional education, simulation, clinical education hybrid models, and telehealth.
As a way of enhancing ASAHP’s activities on Capitol Hill, he was instrumental in creating a (PAC) Political Action Committee for the Association. Also, amicus briefs were filed in August 2012 and September 2013 for cases under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court on the topic of affirmative action in higher education institutions.