Broadening My Perspective

Happy New Year. 2010 promises to be an extraordinary year for health care. And ENA stands front and center positioned for a flagship future “transforming care together” (our 2010 theme). Happy Anniversary. This December ENA will mark the 40th Anniversary of the date our co-founders Judith Kelleher and Anita Dorr first joined together to set the purpose for ENA's journey.

Back in 1970, I was already passionate about emergency nursing practice. I loved the adrenalin rush and found pride in the skills I had honed. However, my perspective was narrow and related to my own practice. Later, as I became a preceptor and a charge nurse, I became interested in the whole 3-11 shift and my colleagues. In the scheme of things, my perspective was still quite narrow. In my roles as educator, trauma coordinator, and manager I served on hospital committees and collaborated with other departments. I became involved with several community projects. If you had asked me then, I would have told you that I had a very broad perspective of emergency nursing. And then I joined ENA.

My journey with ENA has been one of unbridled satisfaction and pure dedication. I can be a zealous advocate for our practice. I am enthusiastic about any project involving emergency nurses. I am always eager to exchange experiences with other emergency nurses and perhaps even obsessive about using stories and information to help improve practice. In a group, I can be fierce about protecting and defending our practice. However, am I too narrow in my focus?

One huge project for me recently was to make committee appointments. As I studied the charges for each committee I found some overlap. Intentionally, there is a Crowding Committee and a Work Team and a Psychiatric Committee and a Work Team. Their charges are discrete, but they are linked. Multiple committees and work teams have opportunity to work together, sharing information to provide a broad perspective of strategies instead of operating as silos.

Another of my projects has been to review the list of emergency nurses appointed to serve as external liaisons to colleague organizations. The list is long and I see those partnerships as silos, tall and vertical, unconnected. Emergency nursing has opportunity to redefine its partnerships.

As I write this I have just returned from the 2009 NOA (Nursing Organizations Alliance) Fall Summit. I am once again energized, passionate, and eager. I am proud to represent emergency nursing and all we stand for, but we are a specialty, and our focus (though our breadth of practice is broad) is narrow. We are a silo in the alliance of nursing organizations. Once again I am excited to find opportunity to revise and broaden my perspective. We have heard the phrase one voice. But each organization has one voice. A unified voice is more powerful. Our organizations have their “sacred cows,” our special area of care. However, in numbers assembled together, with the influence we have as nurses, we can deliver effective messages about access to care, quality, evidence-based practice and transforming care.

I mentioned this will be an extraordinary year for health care. Since nurses are at the heart of care, we need to lead the healthcare delivery reform. Dr. Janet Corrigan, President and CEO of the National Quality Forum (NQF), tells us that transforming care will be driven by performance measurements and reporting requirements. It will require fundamental reform of nursing care delivery as we know it. For me, it means forming partnerships, internally and externally, being inclusive and making that horizontal connection I spoke of previously. It means preserving what we love best about our practice, but supporting some general principles of all nursing organizations. Here I go again. I am on another journey to broaden my perspective. I hope you will be a “silo-buster” and make the journey with me.