ANPD President's Message

Joan Warren, PhD, RN-BC, NEA-BC, FAAN - President of ANPD

I can’t believe how fast this year has gone! I hope you had an opportunity to participate in our Annual Business meeting webinar.  I’m so proud of all the accomplishments ANPD has made throughout 2015, and I’m excited for the direction that the NPD specialty is headed. The Board of Directors met last week and finalized the 2016-2018 strategic plan, and we are adding the finishing touches before unveiling it in the new year. I believe the plan is very aggressive and robust and will continue to grow and advance our specialty. 

As we prepare for the new year, I want to delve into NPD specialists’ role as leaders in their organizations, a topic that has been top of mind lately. I recently attended several conferences for nurse leaders, educators and staff, each focused on the importance of nursing leadership to advance healthcare and the profession. As you know, ANPD has been working tirelessly to promote the role of the NPD specialist as a leader. Yet, we often do not have or know our organizational data to demonstrate how we impact quality, patient safety, patient experience or contain costs.  In our recent research study, the NPD Organizational Value Demonstration Project, we discovered that the majority of NPD specialists’ time is spent in orientation and mandatory education. Is this the best use of our time and talents as leaders in our organizations? Or would our time be better spent affecting care to improve quality and patient safety while reducing costs and improving patient experience? It is essential that, as NPD specialists, we know where we are spending our time and how our activities are aligned with the mission and vision of the organization. To best ensure our activities are aligned with those of the organization, we must know organizational metrics and understand what keeps our leaders up at night.  With this information, we can align our educational activities with the organization’s goals to position ourselves as leaders. As leaders we need to speak up at meetings about how we can support organizational initiatives and demonstrate irrefutably our value to our organizations.

I encourage each of you to take the leap and put yourself out there! Take a global perspective, know your metrics, and align yourself with the goals and missions of your organization, focusing on quality and patient safety to ultimately result in cost reductions for your organization. And don’t spend all your time in areas that don’t show your true value as a leader.

While I’m excited for this opportunity to talk about our leadership role, I also recognize that we may still have some barriers to achieving it. To promote the role of NPD specialists, your leadership team wrote an article for the Career Sphere column in the American Nurse describing the role of the NPD specialist and how it differs from that of academic nurse educators. In this article, we explain that NPD specialists serve as leaders within their healthcare organizations, as we hold the key to understanding the direction our organization is going. The publication will be out in the near future.

As members of ANPD, we need to have a discussion about how we remove ourselves from activities adding little value and position ourselves as leaders. How do we innovate so we put our energy in the right areas? To foster this conversation, I ask that each of you leave a comment to tell how you have been able to innovate and position yourselves as leaders in your organization. We will post some of the ideas shared in the next issue of our bimonthly newsletter, TrendLines.