Spring 2021

SBM’s New Strategic Plan: Your Membership Expanded

The Society of Behavioral Medicine has a new Strategic Plan to make the field—and your career—even more impactful.

Our outcomes for the Strategic Plan were determined by you, our members. Through your input in our survey, the SBM Board of Directors was able to set the course for what SBM should achieve over the next 5 years, in three core areas. We are already hard at work making the plan a reality, to ensure you always have what you need to thrive in your career and are always proud to call SBM your professional home.

Awareness and Impact of Behavioral Medicine

Many members identified a pressing need for the larger biomedical community to better acknowledge and engage with the behavioral medicine specialty. We recognize this opportunity, and one outcome of our Strategic Plan is to ensure that SBM members are seen as knowledge brokers of evidence-based behavior change science. We want to elevate behavioral medicine so that we can help you improve clinical and population health. We know you’re tired of SBM being medicine’s best kept secret—we are too. We are already working on strategic partnerships and how to communicate behavioral medicine’s relevance in solving today’s health problems.

Public Education and Behavioral Change

Scientific research is currently undervalued, and science is often disparaged by those falsely claiming expertise. That’s why another outcome in our Strategic Plan is to increase the public’s access to your science. We want to give you more opportunities to translate your expertise into real-world impact. As engagement with science communication increases, we want to ensure you have the resources you need to broadcast your research on every possible avenue. SBM will help members disseminate their results beyond the traditional behavioral medicine community. To start, we’re creating a list of relevant journalists, assessing science communication barriers, and planning webinars.

Indispensable Professional Resource

In the past year, we have seen profound changes to the world we live in. COVID-19, climate change, and the global demand for racial justice, especially for Black Americans, have caused us to reflect on how we can improve our society. We have developed COVID-19 resources to help you adapt, no matter your professional level or role. We’ve also assessed our current diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts through a rigorous deep-dive, identifying successes and gaps. Inclusion is part of our Annual Meeting theme this year. More to come! Our third Strategic Plan outcome is to always be your indispensable professional home.

Learn more about the Strategic Plan by clicking here.