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How do you plan to stay in touch with AACN members?

Like my predecessor, Dorrie Fontaine [RN, DNSc, FAAN, dean of academic programs at the University of California, San Francisco], I want this to become a dialogue. When I write my president’s column every month, I’ll add my e-mail address to it. Of course, I can’t have a dialogue with 65,000 members, but I do want to be connected with our members.

When I speak at chapters around the country, I want to be able to go to their critical care units and thank the nurses for their contributions. It’s a way to make AACN personal, and I really want members to feel supported by their professional organization.

You mentioned the importance of retaining nurses in critical care. How does AACN plan to address this issue?

AACN gives out a Beacon Award recognizing excellence in intensive care and progressive care environments. The award recognizes evidence-based practice, healthy work environments, and excellent educational preparation. We believe, like Magnet, that the journey gets you to be a better place to work. We want thousands of units [to win Beacon Awards].

We also are helping nurses to remain in their positions by speaking out against disrespectful communication by physicians. We are pulling together research on healthy work environments. We’re working with other nursing organizations and industry to find ways to prevent nurses from being injured and to help our nurses do their work more effectively.

One of the goals for AACN is to become the undisputed leader of acute and critical care nursing in the U.S. How do you propose to do that? There’s a lot of competition for RNs’ time and money.

Right now, the universe of potential critical care nurses numbers about 400,000. We have started redefining ourselves as the organization for progressive care nurses, as well. These nurses take care of very sick patients on telemetry and step-down units. No one was really addressing their needs. If we look at the nurses who are affiliating with us without being members, we have CCRN-certified nurses who are not members.

We have nurses who spend a lot of money on our products, but don’t join AACN. We have started thinking more broadly about the people we influence, maybe thinking in terms of an affiliation rather than those who carry a membership card. We need to ask what these people need and how we can connect with them. That way, we don’t get hung up on whether they’re paying membership dues.

We are starting to think much more inclusively. If we become the organization for these folks, it’s very powerful. The work we’re doing with physician groups is part of this. We want people to say, “If AACN is not at the table, then something’s missing.”We want to be so visible that when anyone wants to know anything about critical care nursing, AACN is the organization to turn to.

We have to have data to be an undisputed leader, so we are investing a lot of our energy in finding out what our members need and how they practice.

It’s clear that you bring extensive skills and experiences to the role of president of AACN. What do you hope to take away from your year as president?

I’m going to be a different person as of June 30. I came to the board at AACN with a pretty good skill set even before I became president. I had been the undergraduate dean at the University of Pennsylvania, but I think in this position, I’m going to learn even more about how effective leadership happens.

AACN’s CEO [Wanda Johanson, RN, MN], the president-elect [Debbie Brinker, RN, CNS, MS, MS, CCRN], and I talk to each other on the phone at least every two weeks. Hearing Wanda’s insights about leading an organization and learning how she does things is going to be incredibly helpful to me.

I can bring everything I’m learning right back to my students and my colleagues in practice. My students are getting a very different class now that I can get the national picture. My bosses also realize that I’m going to bring back a knowledge base that I didn’t have before this experience. The benefits of this role are much bigger than I expected. I think I understand the relationships and the partnerships among board members and some of the key AACN staff much more now.

Karla A. Knight, RN, MSN, is a contributing writer for Nursing Spectrum, which publishes NurseWeek.