Awhile back I published a blog post that delved into the specifics of where board actions are located. Today, I will focus on one of those locations: meeting minutes. It has been suggested that meeting minutes can be used as an early warning system to get an idea of anything that might be happening at the board level with a practitioner’s license.
This can be true in certain situations, but that is not the case universally. There are some limitations to the type of data that can be obtained from meeting minute sources.
1: Meeting minutes do not follow a standardized pattern and vary widely from board to board.
There are a lot of nuances in working with meeting minutes that aren’t immediately apparent to the casual observer. For one, meeting minutes do not follow a standardized pattern. They come in a variety of different forms.
Some are a verbatim record of what happened in a particular meeting. As you can imagine, these tend to be very long and difficult to work with if the record goes on for hundreds of pages. The Alabama Board of Pharmacy reports their meeting minutes in this fashion. See a screenshot of the example below to see what I mean:
