We are pleased to announce that the Society for Pediatric Psychology (SPP) has entered into a renewed intersociety networking initiative with the Society of Behavioral Medicine’s (SBM) Child & Family Health Special Interest Group (C&FH SIG).

Health psychology (including child health psychology) has long been recognized as psychology’s contribution to the interdisciplinary fields of behavioral and preventive medicine. Toward that end, the mission statements of SPP and SBM’s C&FH SIG are highly complementary, and share substantial overlap in purpose and scope of practice. Many in SPP and SBM are also members of both organizations--which further strengthen our connections to one another. Previously, Alan Delamater kindly served as SPP’s liaison to SBM’s C&FH SIG. More recently, Ken Tercyak (APA Division 54 Fellow and Chair of the SBM C&FH SIG) assumed this post, and worked last spring with SPP President Dr. Tonya Palermo and the C&FH SIG membership to establish a new, bi-directional liaison role between SPP and C&FH SIG leadership. With that, the intersociety networking initiative was reborn.

As part of this initiative, we have chosen to focus our initial efforts on three main actions. First, we will cross-post conference announcements on our respective listservs, along with other relevant announcements (such as calls for papers to special journal issues). If you are an SPP listserv subscriber, you may have already noticed these e-mails hitting your in-box. Second, we’re publishing this informational article in Progress Notes to make our members aware of the initiative, and plan to do the same in SBM’s member publication Outlook. It is our sincere hope that as more members of both organizations learn about the initiative, greater collaboration and synergy between the memberships will form over time.

Finally, we hope to increase member-initiated programming at our respective annual meetings that are of greater interest to both societies. SBM is a well-attended scientific conference among psychologists, physicians, nurses, public health specialists, and many others. The past five years have seen a marked increase in both the number and quality of abstract submissions, including symposia and platform talks, focusing on child and family health topics in cancer, diabetes, obesity, disparities, and many others. The upcoming 34th annual meeting of SBM will take place March 20-23, 2013 in San Francisco. We encourage you to keep this annual event in mind, along with SPP conferences, as a possible venue for your best science and continuing education.

If you as members of SPP have additional ideas and suggestions for how our two organizations can work most effectively together in the future, please let us know. We look forward to hearing from you and will keep you posted on our progress.