Arkansas Nurses Association (ARNA)
Arkansas Nurses Day at the Capitol
This week I had the opportunity to go be with 400 other nurses and nursing students at the Arkansas Nurses Association (ARNA), Nurses Day at the Capitol.
I have a lot to say about the whole thing, but the most important thing I want to say is that there are 68,000 nurses in the state of Arkansas.
68,000 nurses
400 of them showed up for this event, most of those were students who were there for credit, and even fewer participate in ARNA regularly.
This is NOT okay. NOT okay.
One of the students asked what were the benefits of being a member of ARNA. I wanted to jump up and grab the microphone, but I’m not on that committee. I wanted to tell her that what you get out of being a member of your professional organization are the things that money can’t buy. You get connections, mentors, job possibilities in places you hadn’t considered before. You get professional growth and a sense of community that you can’t get without that organization. You also get a sense of empowerment. The Arkansas Nurses Association empowers and supports nurses with their ideas and legislation. This means that one of the things that you get with ARNA membership is to be a part of making history! Being a member of the Arkansas Nurses Association means taking responsibility for your career and your profession, stepping up, and working with others to make history with legislation that can make it better for the nurses coming behind you.
This little rant makes me think of John F. Kennedy when he said:
“Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”
There are things we do as a civic responsibility. It’s our duty to show up for these things. It helps our community. But it also helps us in ways that are difficult to measure ahead of time. Looking back it’s much easier to see how connections and community and involvement with our organizations advanced us in our life and goals.
I feel like our country in general has lost that sense of civic duty and service. We need to reclaim it because it helps us all. It makes us all better, lifts everybody, and creates communities that we are proud of.
Anyway, I was happy to be able to see people in person who I only see via Zoom most of the time: Margaret Love, Susie Marks, Neal Reeves. I ran into my friend Rochelle who is now working with the rockstar Dr. Manning at UAMS. The last message I sent to Rochelle was from 2014, and it was awesome to compare our lives and how far we had come since then.
Sarah Bemis, the assistant director for the Eleanor Mann School of Nursing (EMSON), where I got my nursing degree, spoke to us all about the importance of showing up. Again, it is something that has so much impact. And I just put together that she is on the Arkansas Center for Nursing Board of Directors, which is funny because I also connected with Ashley Davis, Executive Director of the same organization. It’s all a big web of community connections.
I was able to tell Sarah Bemis the story of how my mentor, Dr. Susan Patton, who was the Director of the EMSON for a time, was responsible for getting me to advance my degree at a time when I was resisting and could not have imagined going back to school to get a Master of Public Health. I’m so glad I did. The opportunities at this level of my education are far greater for my career than they were with my BSN, which is saying a lot because nursing has a wealth of opportunities.
I have to say though, that I was disappointed in the lack of presence of legislators and Arkansas State Board of Nursing board members. I was fortunate to be able to run into Tippi McCullough, the Representative from the Arkansas House District 33. We had a moment to simultaneously laugh and cry about the ruling in Alabama that declared that embryos were actual children. Does that mean that prospective parents in fertility clinics get to claim their 27 frozen embryos as dependents on taxes? If a lab person chooses one embryo for implantation and trashes the rest, are they a murderer? If a fertility clinic is on fire with hundreds of embryos inside, and a house across the street is on fire with a toddler inside, which lives do we save? If embryos are actual children, then the Alabama Supreme Court seems to say that we save the embryos.
Anyway, Tippi and I appear to have covered a lot in our brief encounter. She was the only legislator that I saw while I was there. Well, that’s not true. I did see French Hill hightailing it out of the building, too fast for me to catch up with him. I would have loved to have talked to him about why he voted against the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that “has injected $241,400,000 into water infrastructure projects across the state protecting public health, preserving water resources, and creating jobs.” I’m grateful that he has a competitor for his seat this election cycle, Marcus Jones, a retired Army Colonel. We have no business voting for people who are voting against Arkansas interests. If you are in the second Congressional District in Arkansas, you now have a competent person to vote for with Marcus Jones. In the meantime, I’ll have to settle for watching Roby Brock ask French Hill on Talk Business & Politics about why he voted against vital funding for Arkansas.
The SANE nurses and Forensic Nurses also had a table. This is so important in our society, especially in light of the attitudes of the general population as witnessed in the above two paragraphs, using fear of men and fear of violence as a nursing tool. SANE nurses are Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners who provide a safe space and valuable services in comprehensive and compassionate care for sexual assault victims. These nurses can also provide expert testimony in court as forensic nurses. Every emergency room in the state should be connected with the Arkansas Forensic Nurses Association because without a SANE nurse on staff, many ER staff members don’t know how to handle caring for sexual assault victims and can easily retraumatize or compromise their care and future mental and physical health.
And the last table I want to talk about is the only table that I didn’t have trouble fighting past a sea of nursing students to see what they were talking about. It was the AARP table. These volunteers were fun and lively and at the ripe old age of 53, I am old enough to be a member (over 50 years old).
The most important takeaway for me in this event is the importance of showing up for your community. I sat through conversations with nurses asking why medical doctors participate so regularly with their professional organizations but this is not currently true of the nurses’ association. I think ultimately that they do not understand the intangible benefits of the Arkansas Nurses Association that money cannot buy. 68,000 nurses participating in ARNA would be a power to be reckoned with. If 68,000 nurses came to the capitol, I’m sure that the legislators would make time to show up to the ARNA event. Shoot, even if 10% of that number showed up, 6,800 would be significant.
Are you a nurse? Are you a member of ARNA yet? You have a huge opportunity to affect positive change in nursing and patient care. All you have to do is show up.
Nurses unite!