Dear COMPAS members,

Thank you all for coming out to the COMPAS meeting in
San Francisco! For those of you unable to attend,
Fred, Sara and I were pleasantly surprised by the
turnout. Some had heard of COMPAS and the Wilderness
Medical Society (WMS), while others had not. At the
meeting we met some great folks with an abundance of
amazing backcountry experience. For those of you
unfamiliar with me, I have taken over as Chair of
COMPAS with Fred Wu and Sara Squyres staying on as
Co-Chairs and Christy Mayfield staying on as an
Advisor.

One of our first orders of business was to change the
policy of COMPAS so as to not require concomitant
membership in WMS. We at COMPAS highly encourage WMS
membership (http://wms.org/) as they are a great
organization, but will not require members to join
WMS.

COMPAS will continue not to charge a membership fee.
Some future ideas we are discussing are:
1)Creating a logo for our organization and having
t-shirts, hats, etc, avalable for folks to purchase.
2) Getting the word out to PA programs and PA students
regarding wilderness medicine rotations, and
specifically the WMS wilderness medicine rotation in
Tennessee.
3)Attempt to have a PA as part of the teaching staff
at the WMS student rotation in Tennessee.
4)Hold a workshop at AAPA on some technical aspect of
wilderness medicine (e.g., backcountry splinting
skills).
5) Getting the "From the PAs Desk" in "Wilderness Magazine" (a
publication of the Wilderness Medical Society) up and running again.

I think COMPAS can be a great organization, and
with your help we can accomplish many of these goals.
I really want to emphasize that I am looking for your
tips & ideas about the future of your organization.
Please feel free to email me.

Also, I'd like to get some photos of you all in
action. If you have any cool digital photos of you or
your friends in the outdoors, please email them to me
so that we can consider placing them on the website.

Best wishes, Cristopher Benner