Emergency nurses crossed continents and oceans to learn from and meet their peers at Emergency Nursing 2025 in New Orleans, arriving from locales as far as Australia, China, Ghana and Saudi Arabia.
“It’s fun meeting new people with like minds to form a community,” said Emmanual Acheampong, BSN, RN, Ghana’s first Trauma Nursing Core Course director, who received an ENA Foundation scholarship to attend.
Worldwide Insights
Nurses from around the world compared triage systems, terminology and other aspects of their EDs in places such as Ghana, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia.
Acheampong was one of the nurses who offered glimpses into their emergency departments during the session “Global Connections: A World Tour of Emergency Nursing,” such as the color-coded layout of his ED that is based on the South African Triage Scale system.
Others talked about helping spread ENA’s TNCC and Emergency Nursing Pediatric Course even farther globally, but they acknowledged the expense and distance to training can be a roadblock.
“My aim as TNCC faculty is to get TNCC instructors and directors trained around the country and have no ED nurse drive no more than three hours to attend a class,” said Hayley Kinchant, MSN, RN, CEN, of New Zealand.
Between speakers, Paul Lacey, BSN, ENC(C), RN, of Canada asked attendees to name the ED equipment shown on slides that were submitted prior to the event. Their answers revealed differences in terminology, brand names and nicknames.
“There is a degree of discrepancy between practice environments in North America,” Lacey said, “and to see how other countries are applying the same information differently is fascinating.”
The U.K. way was the subject of the education session “Lessons from the Royal London Hospital: Integrating Research, Clinical Excellence and Education in Trauma Care.” Lewis Nicholls, BSN, RN, outlined changes made over nearly two decades to improve patient outcomes. Regional trauma networks with national standards were established throughout the U.K., and mandatory data reporting has enabled not only facility-level benchmarking but also trauma research. Nicholls explained that research nurses are embedded in EDs. They participate in huddles and rounds as well as translate new research into practice, train nurses to conduct their own research and recruit for clinical trials.
“The impact has been dramatic,” he said.
Global Connections
Emergency Nursing 2025 enabled global nurses to make new connections, including capturing a quick photo in the Experience Hall in between sessions.
The session “Global Nurse Wellness Awareness” was another opportunity to talk about shared challenges along with ideas for solutions. Walter Sergio Lugari, MSH, RN, an emergency nurse who works in Germany and a member of the ENA Conference Education Planning Committee and the ENA Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Council, facilitated small group discussions, resulting in ideas that ranged from guaranteeing nurses have someone to cover for them so they can debrief to nationalizing health care and education systems to protecting break times and offering wholesome foods for nurses during their downtime.
“It’s all about connection,” said Kelly Collins, MSN, BSN, RN, CEN, CPEN, of Maine, who also helped guide the session. “There seems to be a lot of disconnect in a lot of emergency rooms these days. Hopefully with all this brain power in this room maybe we can think about how we connect with what we have right now while working to strive for a better process in the future.”