Working together to fulfill the AORN dream
Article Outline
- Special Thanks
- Optimism for the Future
- Promoting our Profession
- Patient and Practitioner Safety
- Preserving the Future
- A Global Resource
- Notes
- Copyright
Paula R. Graling, RN
When I first became a candidate for the AORN Board of Directors in 1998, I was one of the youngest ever to seek the position. I promised then to focus my youth and energy on making AORN the world's premiere health care association—an association that would be relevant to our nurses and our patients and one that would be accountable to the highest standards of professionalism.
Today, we are all a little older and wiser, but nothing about that promise has changed. Indeed, we have worked together to fulfill the promise I made to you and the promise we made to each other. Because of our vision, today's AORN is stronger, more respected, and more relevant to perioperative nursing practice than ever before. For that, I thank all of you who have sacrificed so much to advance our practice and our profession.
During each of my candidacies, I began my speeches by talking about the history of nursing and AORN. I have done that for one simple reason: I truly respect and admire those who have come before us, and I wish to honor the visionaries who have brought us to where we are today. From now on, however, I will not be talking about our past. As your President, I will be talking about our future.
Today, we have assembled one of the finest Boards of Directors, Headquarters' staffs, and volunteer leadership teams that AORN has ever known. We have access to the most advanced research so that we can care for patients while reaping incomparable professional and personal satisfaction. We have greater exposure to the public and greater access to the nation's corridors of power so that we can use our knowledge to change attitudes and change laws. Most importantly, we have the will and the desire to follow through with our initiatives.
Special Thanks
Before I discuss specific plans for our year ahead, I want to thank some very special people who have supported me as a nurse and as a President-in-training: my husband David; my daughters, Ashley and Jessica; and my father and stepmother, Paul and Bee Rigsby. These amazing people are my chauffeurs; my chefs; my tech support; my speech critics; and most of all, my inspiration. Without them, I would not be the person I am today, and I would not be able to give my best to this Association. I would like to say thank you as we start an even busier year.
I also would like to thank my administrator, chief nurse executive, supervisor, and coworkers from Inova Fairfax Hospital, Falls Church, Va, who have been so tolerant of my schedule and the demands of AORN. They continuously show their support for me and AORN, and they make me proud to be part of such a great team.
I am fortunate to have been mentored by many of our past Presidents. These mentors taught me how to strategize in and out of the boardroom, interact with foreign dignitaries, engage our industry partners, and prepare myself to be a good President. To each of you with whom I have had the privilege to serve, I want to say thank you for your guidance and support. My final thanks go to my most recent partners, the 2005 2006 Board and Headquarters staff members and especially President Sharon McNamara, RN, MS, CNOR, for working collaboratively with me this year to continue our journey as an organization and for advancing the profession of perioperative nursing.
Optimism for the Future
I was especially honored to accept the President's gavel in my home town of Washington, DC. No matter how many times I rehearsed for that moment, it was still overwhelming to step up to the podium as your President, and it is a day I will never forget. Standing at the podium reminded me of the spot at the top of the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. stood looking over the magnificent Reflecting Pool as he gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. I can imagine the energy and optimism that Dr King felt about the future of the civil rights movement as he looked out over the vast crowd. I feel the same energy and optimism as I think about the future of AORN and our profession. We may not be leading a civil rights revolution, but we are leading a health care revolution. Just as Dr King's work improved the quality of life for millions of Americans, I believe that we will improve the quality of life for millions of patients and nurses. What lies in store for AORN? What is the AORN dream?
Promoting our Profession
I have often talked about the concept of anonymity. As perioperative nurses, we are all too familiar with the doubleedged sword of being anonymous in our success. My daughter Jessica recently completed an anatomy internship with me, and I had an opportunity to read what she recorded in her journal.
Spending a day in the OR with my mom made me realize that she deals with people's lives every day.
There were so many things she did for her patients that the people never knew because they were asleep.
Sadly, as much as we have advanced as a profession, we are still the forgotten heroes in our hospitals. It is that lack of recognition that makes it hard to fill our ranks, or at times, justify our existence.
Colleagues, we cannot continue to be anonymous. We must focus on promoting our practice to others as well as to ourselves and be the practice resource for the perioperative profession. This year we will strive to accomplish this, through several endeavors that I will outline for you.
Let me begin by recognizing that before we can promote our profession to others, we have to be unified about our own practices and procedures. Who has not dealt with a question about alcohol preps and fire safety, or tissue handling and storage, or when to count or not to count? It is imperative that we, as an Association, speak with a unified voice to put nurses’ minds at ease. You are doing your job in asking the important questions. Now we need to do our job by giving you straightforward, logical, and scientifically proven answers.
Our Recommended Practice (RP) Committee members will be working to put our collective intellectual capital into your hands to make your workday easier. They understand the importance of this job and are enthusiastic about new ways of getting RPs into everyday practice. Our corporate publishing partnership with Elsevier provides us with unique opportunities to broaden our reach in this area.
We will empower every nurse with the Perioperative Nursing Data Set (PNDS). A universal terminology is vital to the survival of our profession and the safety of our patients, and it is not good enough to keep it relegated to something used only by the classification taxonomists. Our PNDS Task Force will be working to define the data elements needed to refine the health care quadrant and expand use of the benchmarking dashboard to guide perioperative decision making among nurse managers and clinicians in a variety of settings.
I have appointed three practice issue task forces: one to update our knowledge of patients and health care workers with bloodborne diseases, another to create a guideline on the management of venous stasis in the perioperative setting, and a third to develop a guidance document on patient care management of intraoperative fluid shifts during operative procedures to address practice issues in gynecology, urology, plastic surgery, and arthroscopic procedures.
The Nursing Practices Committee will update our statement on malignant hyperthermia. Our International Resource Committee is working diligently to plan a Latin American conference, which will highlight our mutual sharing of perioperative knowledge and cultural exchange. Our three fall conferences will focus on the themes of management, ambulatory surgery, and clinical practice as we work with our specialty assemblies to make sure that specific specialty needs are addressed within each topic area.
We cannot exist without a partnership between management and clinical practice. Our patients depend on the best of both. For the Leadership Conference in July, we will invite perioperative directors to accompany their chapter presidents to Denver to learn side by side. AORN has the resources to offer both groups a worthwhile experience, and the synergy of the professional networks will benefit all who attend.
Patient and Practitioner Safety
We will continue to advocate for patient safety. We have had great success during the last two years giving you resources to address patient safety issues within your practice environments. Most of you probably remember our successful 2004 National “Time Out” Day, where we launched surgical site marking in accordance with the Universal Protocol. Last year, our Safe Medication Administration Tool Kit renewed the importance of labeling medications, and in 2006 we will introduce a Fire Safety Tool Kit with education about fire prevention and fire management strategies. We also are working with the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management and the Healthcare Financial Management Association to complete the business case for safety.
As the boundaries of our ORs extend outside of traditional areas and new hybrid ORs become popular, AORN will work collaboratively with our industry and health care partners to address issues that may arise from our emerging practices. Our human factors research will guide us to communicate crucial information accurately and effectively and to astutely deal with distractions, such as noise and speed, in our environments.
AORN's Workplace Safety Committee continues to fight to reduce your exposure to smoke and percutaneous injuries through its collaboration with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. We are now focusing on the issues of on-call requirements and fatigue and are advocating for a fair and equitable standard for nurses work hours.
I would be remiss if I did not mention our legislative efforts. There is nothing more important for protecting our patients and preserving our future than demanding that every surgical patient have a perioperative RN to see him or her safely through one of the most traumatic life experiences. That remains our number one legislative priority.
Preserving the Future
We also must focus on preserving the future of our profession. We did not become nurses just because it was a job; most of us became nurses because of our inherent compassion for others and our desire to be part of a profession that values life and helps patients overcome serious illness or injury and to get another chance at living their dreams.
We look inside the OR doors and know that we would not want a family member lying on that table without a perioperative RN at his or her side. We must make sure that our children and grandchildren are protected by the same kinds of compassionate professionals who adhere to the same high standards that we are now promoting. This requires that we keep AORN strong by reaching out to the brightest minds of tomorrow.
We have to sell the practice of perioperative nursing, and we have to pass our wisdom and love of giving to young people who may not yet know what nursing is all about. This starts by encouraging you to not only love what you do, but to understand that you are an integral part of the larger nursing family.
We also must make our presence known in colleges across the country. That is why I have appointed a Task Force on Undergraduate Academic Curriculum Development to review the recommendations of the Think Tank on Perioperative Nursing,1 and to follow up the position statement addressed at Congress, which recommends that perioperative clinical learning activities be directly included in undergraduate programs.2
We have expanded the Advanced Practice Issues Task Force to include nurses with graduate degrees in order to highlight the number of opportunities for master's degree prepared nurses within perioperative practice. AORN is committed to exploring how we can use the emerging roles of the clinical nurse leader and doctor of nursing practice in our specialty.
Last year, more than 30,000 nursing students were denied access to nursing programs solely because of a lack of faculty members. I am confident that AORN will actively participate with our other nursing association partners in searching for a solution to this daunting problem, which faces our entire profession
Our Career Lifecycle Task Force will look at ways to engage all nurses in the excitement of perioperative practice, either through the eager and inquisitive eye of the novice nurse or the more experienced eye of the Baby Boomer. As our membership matures, we must recognize the importance of passing our collective knowledge on to future generations. I have appointed a Legacy Task Force to guide our keynote speaker in addressing this issue at the Leadership Conference. We must sit up, pay attention, and take good notes when our most experienced members share with us their knowledge and their contributions to our profession.
A Global Resource
AORN is not a building in Denver or a meeting in New Orleans; Washington, DC; or Orlando. It is not a presidential figurehead standing at a podium. AORN is like America—it is not defined by a place or a person. It is a collection of people, ideas, and resources. It is an ideological and professional network of support that protects everyone it serves—whether in the hospital, surgery center, physician's office, battlefield, or classroom.
We have become a global resource for perioperative nursing practice, and we continue to provide the knowledge and tools to make your job easier, safer, and more effective. I hope that we can help you gain personal satisfaction and accomplishment from your profession.
In closing, I would like to share my presidential logo with you. The Nightingale lamp is symbolic to all of us as the beginning of our professional nursing practice. To many, our AORN logo is the beacon of safe surgical care. A starburst much like the fireworks which light the sky over the Washington monument every Fourth of July denotes future growth and prosperity (Figure 1).
Figure 1.
2006 presidential logo
I hope you will see my vision in the flame in the center as we work together this year to fulfill the AORN dream—promoting our practice, protecting our patient, and preserving our future.
Notes
- . Think Tank on Perioperative Learning Experiences in the Nursing Curriculum: Summary Report . Phoenix: National League for Nursing; 2004;
- “The value of clinical learning activities in the perioperative setting in undergraduate nursing curricula,” (proposed position statement) . AORN Journal . January 2006;83:114–115
Editor's note: This article is adapted from President Graling's speech before the AORN Congress House of Delegates in Washington, DC, March 23, 2006.
Editor's notes: National “Time Out” Day is a service mark of AORN, Inc, Denver. Universal Protocol is a trademark of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.
PII: S0001-2092(06)60001-X
doi:10.1016/S0001-2092(06)60001-X
© 2006 AORN, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc All rights reserved.
