ENA 2023: Expectations of This Year’s Meeting

Announcer:
You’re listening to Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Terry Foster about what’s to come at the Emergency Nurses Association 2023 Annual Meeting. He’s a Critical-Care Clinical Nurse Specialist and the 2023 President of the Emergency Nurses Association. Let’s hear from him now.

Mr. Foster:
I can tell you what attendees can expect from this meeting, and that is they can expect everything.  There’s educational sessions.  There are keynote presentations.  There are short 30-minute sessions.  There’s more in-depth and deeper-dive sessions as well.  There’s clinical, there’s educational, academic, administrative, research, like the whole gamut of emergency nursing, it’s encompassed in this conference.  And they can also expect to learn a lot in our Experience Hall, our Exhibit Hall.  I learn so much in there just stopping at a booth and picking out the latest technology and hearing about it, and that’s obviously something that I can learn from and take back, and a lot of times that’s more palatable than sometimes, like, sitting in a class.  We have a ton of just great educational sessions, and I mean, these are things we’ve really worked to make it applicable to what emergency nurses need and want today.  I envision this emergency nurse working in this hospital maybe mid- shift, maybe day-shift, or whatever.  What is it that we can talk to them about, maybe teach them, maybe give them some strategies, things like that that they can take back and apply as soon as they get back to work.  So we obviously have more of the inspirational sessions, especially, talking about taking care of ourselves as emergency nurses before we can take care of others, which is very important, but a lot of trendy things, like telehealth.   We talk about misdiagnosed conditions in the emergency department, which is a reality and something that we don’t want to happen.  We talk about, obviously, legal aspects of emergency nursing, staff initiatives for retention, which is huge today to get emergency nurses to stay in the profession itself, global perspectives.  We are not just a national organization at all.  We are a global organization, and we have emergency nurses from all over the world—from Australia, from the Netherlands, from Canada, from Guam, from England—who attend these, and we want to make sure they feel welcome, that it is also something that it can apply to them, but we can also learn from them as well.  I have always said this.  I attend this conference because I feel like I can go back and do this job for another year.  I’m in a room with two- or 3,000 other emergency nurses who are facing the same issues that I’m facing, and they’re getting through it, and this is something I can take back and use as well, and I just love it.  I’ve actually been at this conference so many times and have thought, “I can’t wait to get back to work.” 

I’m looking forward to so many things to take away.  I like to hear a nurse’s perspective, but I also like to hear perspectives from people outside of the profession, maybe for business or logistics or somebody who’s talking about trends that we have both in the world, the market, all those things.  I love to go to hear the clinical sessions as well.  I’ve worked at my hospital for a long time.  Because I’m here, doesn’t mean I know the best way or the only way.  It’s the way I know how.  So it’s very neat to hear different approaches to things that maybe I have dealt with for a longer period of time, especially technology-wise, AI. 

I’m looking forward to everything, the entire experience, just the human connection, the energy, again, the comradery, but just the whole thing.  And it’s in San Diego.  I mean, truly, not too shabby.  We work really hard in our jobs as emergency nurses, but we also know how to have a good time and just let loose a little bit, and I think I just can’t wait for that. 

Announcer:
That was ENA President Terry Foster, giving us an inside look at what’s to come at the 2023 Emergency Nurses Association Annual Meeting. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit ReachMD dot com slash Clinician’s Roundtable, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!