From rising up to meet emergency nursing’s most pressing challenges to celebrating a decades-long career, this year’s Anita Dorr, RN, FAEN, Memorial Lecture and Luncheon at Emergency Nursing 2024 yesterday was filled with enthusiasm, inspiration and new ideas.
ENA President Chris Dellinger (left) presented Susan Douglass with the Judith C. Kelleher Award.
The luncheon featured keynote speaker Carol Grove, DNP, RN, NEA-BC, vice president and chief nursing officer at WVU Medicine Camden Clark Medical Center. Her talk, “Rising Up to the Challenge,” discussed how nurse leaders have innovated and solved problems for decades to find solutions to the profession’s most pressing issues. She shared ideas and leadership strategies for emergency nursing to continually move forward amid current struggles and barriers.
The luncheon also honored Susan Douglass, MSN, RN, CEN, the recipient of the Judith C. Kelleher Award, ENA’s most prestigious honor.
The afternoon was energizing and inspiring for attendees.
“Talks like these motivate me,” said ENA President Chris Dellinger, MBA, BSN, RN, FAEN. “They’re inspirational. They fill my cup up and get me excited for the rest of the conference.”
Grove’s keynote address highlighted ways that nursing innovations throughout history have made a difference in patient care, including ones from ENA co-founder Anita Dorr herself.
“Anita Dorr identified many things she was able to implement, not the least of which was the crash cart,” Grove said. “That was a need that was identified and something that she and her husband came up with to address that need.”
Carol Grove, vice president and chief nursing officer at WVU Medicine Camden Clark Medical Center, discussed how emergency nurses can rise to the challenge during her keynote address at the Anita Dorr, RN, FAEN, Memorial Lecture and Luncheon at Emergency Nursing 2024.
As nursing moves forward, leaders and front-line staff can follow Dorr’s example to find creative and daring solutions to nursing shortages, burnout, workplace violence and other pressing challenges.
Grove’s keynote address provided inspirational examples from decades past, such as how the profession has innovated through nearly a century of nursing shortages.
“I really appreciated Carol’s talk on how we can rise up to the challenge and take some of the nuggets from … years ago and see how we can apply them today,” Dellinger said.
Grove’s keynote address emphasized the need for ongoing education, peer support, self-care, shared governance, well-being and resilience programs, as well as leading with grace.
“We’re nurses. This is who we are, and this is what we do,” Grove said. “We’re going to continue to grow our profession.”
Luncheon attendees also heard from Douglass, a leader who Dellinger called a “shining example” of emergency nursing excellence.
Douglass’s accomplishments include championing the passage of a strengthened Texas child safety seat law and serving as president of both the Texas ENA State Council and the San Antonio ENA chapter, among many others. She’s barely slowed down in her retirement. She still teaches the Trauma Nursing Core Course) and is an instructor and trainer for a bleeding control course called Stop the Bleed. She also teaches older adults about falls prevention through the National Council on Aging, as well as a course she helped develop called Falls Awareness Lengthens Lives.
She called receiving the Judith C. Kelleher Award “absolutely the most important honor of my entire life.”
“I’ve had the most fun in nursing that I think anybody could have,” she said. “I’ve loved every minute of it.”