news release
ANDREW J. SPANO, Westchester County Executive JOSHUA LIPSMAN, M.D., M.P.H., Commissioner of Health SUSAN TOLCHIN, Director of Communications

CONTACT: SUSAN TOLCHIN (914) 995-2932

MARY LANDRIGAN (914) 813-5013

(914) 813-5000 (After Hours)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE June 29, 2004

COUNTY HEALTH COMMISSIONER NAMED TO NATIONAL BOARD

Dr. Joshua Lipsman to be Trustee of American Board of Preventive Medicine

The Westchester County Department of Health announced today that Commissioner Joshua Lipsman, M.D., M.P.H. is being named a Trustee of the American Board of Preventive Medicine (ABPM) for a three-year term beginning January 1, 2005.

“I am delighted and honored to be named to the ABPM,” said Dr. Lipsman. “I believe that my appointment is recognition of the importance and value that local public health offers to the field of Preventive Medicine,” he added. Dr. Lipsman will be the only local health officer on the 11-member Board, which includes physicians from academia, government, the military, the corporate sector and a state health department.

The ABPM, founded in 1948, is the independent, non-profit oversight body for the medical specialty areas of Aerospace Medicine, Occupational Medicine, and Public Health and General Preventive Medicine. About 1% of the more than 760,000 board-certified physicians practicing in the United States and Canada are specialists in Preventive Medicine. The main activities of the ABPM are to develop, administer and evaluate the annual examinations for physicians wishing to become Board certified in these areas. It meets twice each year.

“It is a privilege for Westchester County to have Dr. Lipsman as a member of an important body like the ABPM,” said County Executive Andy Spano, who appointed Dr. Lipsman as his Health Commissioner in May 2000. “We are proud of Dr. Lipsman and his achievement,” he added.

Dr. P. Glenn Merchant, Chair of the ABPM stated, “We look forward to the insight and expertise that Dr. Lipsman will bring. The Board is a vibrant group that gets its strength and energy from its members.”

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Dr. Lipsman, 47, is Board certified in Preventive Medicine, and also in Family Medicine. Prior to coming to Westchester, Dr. Lipsman was Executive Director of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in Manhattan in 1999, and prior to that, for seven and a half years he led the Alexandria, Virginia department of health. He previously was the medical director and administrator of the city’s system of public health clinics in Houston, Texas, and a staff physician and community health director on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota.

Dr. Lipsman received his M.D. degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, and completed a family medicine residency at the St. Paul-Ramsey Medical Center in Minnesota. He holds an M.P.H. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, School of Public Health. He is currently studying at night toward the J.D. degree at Pace Law School in White Plains.

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