VOLUME 3, 2009 SEPTEMBER /OCTOBER
Upcoming Events:
SEPTEMBER 2009
Monthly Meeting@ Michael’s September 2
OCTOBER 2009
Fall Workshop “SKIN DEEP” October 3
Monthly Meeting@ Michael’s October 7
Halloween October 31
NOVEMBER 2009
CNOR Prep Course November 7-8
Perioperative Nurse week
Thanksgiving November 26
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September/October President’s Message
All my life I have looked forward to Septembers. Yes, it’s strange. Sand, beach blankets, Coppertone, and bare feet all yielding to the kilts and cardigans, knee socks and saddle shoes of my school days, and then to the serious business of getting down to real work in the adult world, should probably be a sad, or at least wistful transition.
But the clean slate has always been the appeal for me. Each fall, school presented a new chance: Crisp textbooks, sharp pencils with tall erasers, homerooms with no seat assignments, grade books that didn’t have any red X’s in them. While comfortably structured with tiled corridors and bells to signal the change of classes, there was an opportunity to start anew; to study, to learn, to participate, to join. By the time I was in the adult workforce, this rhythm of life had become ingrained, as it is for me today.
In a way, we have a similar opportunity every day in our work. Each patient presents us with an open, blank book. We have an opportunity to make each and every case an optimum experience. By doing our homework, we can prepare to go all out for a “straight-A” report card (measurable outcomes). Our research (academic or collaborative) can bring higher grades of care (evidence based practice) to our patients. Our teamwork (cooperation and effort - what parents’ eyes see first on the report card) can pull it all together for a department wide expression of esprit de corps (school spirit). As Nurses who are Lifelong Learners, we have a new chance to make the (summa cum laude) grade – every day!
Allyson M. Kuppens RN BSN CNOR
President, AORN San Jose
For AORN of San Jose this September, we also have many opportunities for achieving top grades. We have a series of monthly dinner & education meetings planned, a Fall and a Spring Workshop, and for the first time ever, a collaborative venture this November with AORN national to prepare OR Nurses to take the certification exam. Each of these endeavors needs volunteers, so don’t be shy. In fact, some hospitals are not represented in the monthly meeting host list. AORN San Jose Wants YOU! (That means you, El Camino, Valley Med, Good Sam, Regional……)
Perioperative Nurse Week will be upon us in November. Is anyone interested in developing a community-based program for the Chapter to share with the public what exactly it is we do for them and their loved ones? Or provide a way we can contribute to what they do?
You see, I had heard so much about the future: welcome it, embrace it, prepare for it, etc. Isn’t that all I’ve ever done? I thought. After all, I learned the laparoscopic stuff, the endovascular stuff, the off-pump CABG stuff, the robotic stuff. Couldn’t they just leave me alone and figure I’d learn the “next” stuff too? Then I really saw the logo. It’s like one of the hands on it had reached out and slapped me. I had missed the whole point.
The future of OR Nursing isn’t the technology. It isn’t innovation. It isn’t minimally invasive.
The Future of OR Nursing is the People who will be the OR Nurses. It’s the GenXers, their children, and their children. It’s those new graduates, and twenty-somethings, and the thirty-ishes. It’s the sea of youth before me. It’s the wave of even more change, the tide of even more possibility, the endless ocean of new potential.
It’s their hands on the logo, reaching out. To us. Together, we can build on our heritage of questioning, challenging authority, and breaking old ties to ideas that have lost their meaning. Let’s not just embrace change, future, or ideas. Let’s embrace the people who will bring them about. Let’s show them we had a part to play, and because we did, we can now reach out to them and trust that they will do their part. Let’s see “them” as that one new young nurse on our staff. Awkward, insecure, inexperienced. Instead of “eating our young,” how about taking him or her by the hand, answering the insatiable curiosity with the science, the evidence, the experience behind why we do what we do. Let’s not glaze over with the two dozen questions. Let’s answer them. Let’s not make them rail against our inflexibility (remember when we didn’t trust anyone over thirty?). Let’s try to understand where they’re coming from and where they’re going. Let’s yield to their thought process. It’s just as valid as ours. Even if (or maybe because) it’s from a different generation. And the beat goes on la de da de de, la de da de da
Allyson M. Kuppens RN BSN CNOR
President’s May Message – Delegate Insight / Reflections on Congress / Embrace the Future
As a Baby Boomer, I have been maligned and misunderstood: I am a generation who demanded action and then “copped out.” Because of me there will be no Social Security. I am the reason there is a health and a health care crisis in the US. I didn’t save enough. I didn’t give enough. I didn’t work hard enough. My parents have been exalted as the “Greatest Generation.” My children are “Gen Xers.” My sense is that their collective identities are somehow more valued than mine. I wonder, sometimes, how I can walk out the door each morning.
Born in December 1952, I received the oral polio vaccine in Braintree, Massachusetts. I had a blonde Barbie, and my friend Jane had a brunette with a ponytail. We did Civil Defense drills where we sheltered in the school cloakroom. I had Madras plaid shorts and a pink Hula Hoop. We ice skated to music from our transistor radios. We watched Walt Disney in black and white, but I knew somewhere there were kids actually seeing the “wonderful world in color” as Tinker Bell waved her wand. In the sixth grade, Sister Paraclete announced on the school’s intercom that President Kennedy had been shot. I watched as Armstrong landed on the moon while I scooped ice cream for cones on a late summer night at The Dainty Maid on Route 6 in Wareham. We did the Twist with Chubby Checker to the forty-five on the record player. The Beatles came across the pond. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were killed. Woodstock and the Summer of Love came and went. James Kirk assumed the helm of the Enterprise. I graduated high school in 1970. Investigative Journalism became part of the lexicon, with Deep Throat an oft quoted source. The soldiers started coming home from Vietnam my senior year in college - to everyone’s hometown. Patty Hearst, the Hostages in Iran, gas rationing, tanks in Czechoslovakia, Solidarity (and a Pope) in Poland…Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, Students’ Rights. LSD, Sit-Ins, Bussing, Strikes, Moratorium, Free Love, Demonstration, Petition, etc., etc., ad nauseum.
Is it any wonder that when I first heard recently about ‘Free Radicals” I wondered where they were still being held?
While new political frontiers were advanced, mainframes downsized. Calculators replaced sliderules. Test tube babies (and Apple Computers) were born. Shuttle flights became routine, and of course, Al Gore invented the Internet…Thought was freed, imagination was vindicated, politics were realigned, change was exhorted, nothing was sacred, and anything was possible.
They say that what happens when you’re ten has life defining consequences. For me, Kennedy was killed, and, thought many, so was idealism. I know I approach situations with some degree of skepticism, and, at times, cynicism. For my oldest son at ten (a GenXer), the Berlin Wall came down. With it came crumbling the barriers between people, relationships, ideas, and futures. The planet became smaller, more like a home. We began to see we were going to have to make it all work. Together. And that we could. My son has always struck me as an optimist. Coincidence?
To make a very long story short, my “AHA” moment at Congress this year was when I looked at the logo again, and saw it for the first time.
THE FALL WORKSHOP WILL BE “SKIN DEEP”
Please save the date October 3rd 8:00-12:00
Flyer will be mailed out
SEPTEMBER AORN MEETING
6:00 Dinner
6:30 Speaker
7:30 Meeting
HOST: KAISER SANTA Clara
TOPIC: A PRIMER ON CONJUNCTIVOCHIASIS AND ITS TREATMENT
SPEAKER: Carol Diamantine with Bio-Tissue
OBJECTIVES: 1. Describe what conjunctivochasis and its symptoms.
2. Discuss surgical treatment using amniotic membrane.
3. Discuss risks of receiving human tissue transplants.
4. Discuss post operative treatment course.
PLACE: MICHAEL’S AT SHORELINE
960 No. Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View, 650-962-1014
DATE: Wednesday, September 2, 2009
DINNER: BBQ PICNIC $22.00
BBQ Chicken, vegetarian chili, deviled eggs, potato salad, Mixed greens, and garlic bread
R.S.V.P. Friday, August 28, 2009
Molly Attell (408) 851-6817, Marlene Attell @kp.org
We will NOT call you. Liaisons are responsible for getting the information to us.
Provider approved by the Board of Registered Nursing. CEPS2168 for 1 Contact hour.
DIRECTIONS: From 101 North or South: Take Shoreline Exist East. Follow Shoreline Blvd. approximately 1 mile, Continue through the park Entrance and follow the signs to the restaurant.
EVERYONE IS WELCOME: Membership in AORN is not required and dinner is optional. You may attend the lecture only. Please join us.
LIAISONS: REMEMBER WHEN CALLING IN ORDERS FOR DINNER, BE SURE AND GIVE THE NAMES OF THOSE ATTENDING SO WE CAN TRACK WHO EATS and PAYS.
OCTOBER AORN MEETING
5:30 Board Meeting Board members, please be prompt
6:00 Dinner
6:30 Speaker
7:30 Meeting
HOST: MILLS PENISULA HOSPITAL
TOPIC: TO BE ANNOUNCED
SPEAKER: TO BE ANNOUNCED
PLACE: MICHAEL’S AT SHORELINE
960 No. Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View, 650-962-1014
DATE: Wednesday, October 7, 2009
DINNER: SOUTHWEST BUFFET $23.00
It includes chicken Monterey, Mexican rice pilaf, black bean salad, mixed greens, layered Mexican dip, chips, salsa and rolls.
R.S.V.P. By Friday October 2, 2009
Rosa Berry e-mail: mrbarry14@yahoo.com
We will NOT call you. Liaisons are responsible for getting the information to us.
Provider approved by the Board of Registered Nursing. CEPS2168 for 1 Contact hour. .
DIRECTIONS: From 101 North or South: Take Shoreline Exist East. Follow Shoreline Blvd. approximately 1 mile, Continue through the park Entrance and follow the signs to the restaurant.
EVERYONE IS WELCOME: Membership in AORN is not required and dinner is optional. You may attend the lecture only. Non members will be charged $1.00 for CEU. Please join us.
LIAISONS: REMEMBER WHEN CALLING IN ORDERS FOR DINNER, BE SURE AND GIVE THE NAMES OF THOSE ATTENDING SO WE CAN TRACK WHO EATS and PAYS.
TREASURER’S REPORT SEPTEMBER 2009
May 2009
Ending Balance $18,165.04
Deposits + 724.00
7/20/09 380.00
8/11/09 344.00
Disbursements - 509.12
5/05/09 157.12
6/24/09 352.00
AUGUST 2009 BALANCE: $18,298.80
EMBRACING THE FUTURE OF PERIOPERATIVE NURSING
Inspired by the message of Embracing the Future of Perioperative Nursing, the Chapter presented to its two student members (who had just passed their nursing boards and were job hunting) the 2009 Perioperative Standards and Recommended Practices, along with the study units for credit which they could complete and add to their resumees. We wish to support the start of their careers in Perioperative Nursing. They are Amy Jackson and Marco Pecenco. Congratulations! President’s May Message – Delegate Insight / Reflections on Congress / Embrace the Future
Delegate Reports
3-22-09
I would like to express my sincere thanks to the San Jose Chapter of AORN for the opportunity to serve as a delegate to Congress. Although my delegate duties impacted some of the educational opportunities, I truly enjoyed listening to the candidate speeches, proposed new Position Statements and By-Laws changes. When I voted, I felt that I represented all of my perioperative colleagues who could not attend Congress. Taking the opportunity to talk with some of the candidates and a Board Member renewed my enthusiasm regarding what it means to be a true professional, which is to mentor and give back to your profession. I spent time reviewing many of the new research-based posters to bring back the “evidence” to our practice. Mike Rayburn’s entertaining comedy/guitar talk on “What If and Why Not” reminded me not to listen to negative self talk, but to continue to create goals higher than you think you can attain. I enjoyed spending time on the exhibit floor learning about the latest technologies, making my wish list, and attending some of the continuing education classes. The educator specialty assembly offered some valuable tips on AORN’s new educational products, including Syntegrity, which integrates the Universal PNDS language into a paperless charting. Other systems can be confusing because they may have their own regional definitions of terms. Finally, the opportunity to network with colleagues and visit some of the interesting geographical and cultural offerings of the Chicago area was a lot of fun. Thirty years in the operating room and still loving it.
Molly Attell RN MS CNOR PHN September/October President’s Message
CONGRESS 2010
AORN has notified us that we can send eight delegates to Congress (Denver, March 13-18) this year. Want to go? Do your homework: ask about the criteria for delegate selection.
It’s never too early to think about serving as an officer. Why not indicate an interest, so the person in that office now could share insights and decision-making strategies with you to prepare you for next year?
Is there another way you would like to share your knowledge, expertise, and enthusiasm? Step up! Is there something you could submit to our newsletter about events or career development? We’d love to hear from you. We’d even put a gold star next to your name!