Abstract
As the new president of NABN, I want to take a little of your time to recap the last 7 years and share with you a bit of my vision for the future of our organization. We started the NABN after a tremendously successful information session in 2004. We had hopes that 45–50 persons might attend our fledgling offering, and over 100 packed the room. The Bariatric Consortium chaired by Mary Ann Rose, a partnership between East Carolina University and Pitt County Memorial Hospital, saw a dream take form. The organization was inaugurated, and from that tenuous beginning we have grown and shared great conferences in various locations, including Ashville, Williamsburg, Nashville, Charleston, Orlando, and Norfolk. We have members from nearly every state and several foreign countries! Nearly 1,000 people have joined us through the years. Significant evidence has been disseminated to support excellent patient care management and delivery.
In addition, we have a successful corporate council. The corporate members support the organization at our conferences and in so many other ways. They come to our conferences and share their technology, devices, resources, educational materials, and time. They have become friends, and nearly family, to us and the people we care for in practice. Last year, for example, a corporate member was called for help after being consulted by an individual who found us on the web. She had a significant patient care issue. After just a couple of phone calls, we had her in contact with a resource who supported her management of a terrifically challenging patient care issue. Our corporate council is a real-life, everyday opportunity for us to have the most up-to-date resources and be cutting edge in excellent patient care delivery.
Finally, we have a fantastic journal. You are reading some of the best, most current information about our patient population! Editor-in-Chief Lisa Rowen, DNSc, RN, FAAN, and Associate Editor Renay Tyler, DNP, RN, ACNP, have been with us since the inception of the journal. Regrettably, they have recently announced that they will be stepping down from their respective roles on Bariatric Nursing and Surgical Patient Care at the end of 2010. What a team they have been, providing leadership for the editorial staff that includes Managing Editor Lois Gould, MS! In the last 5 years, our high-quality journal has published over 2,500 pages contributing much to our understanding of obesity and bariatric nursing. During the conference, we missed them but were fortunate to have our new editorial staff present: Editor-in-Chief Kristin L. Seidl, PhD, RN, who is Director of Outcomes for Nursing and Patient Care, University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC); Associate Editor Carmel McComiskey, MS, CRNP, who is Director of Nurse Practitioners, UMMC; and our new Managing Editor, Susan Santos Carey, MS, who is Professional Development Coordinator, Office of Clinical Practice and Professional Development, UMMC. Please look for their contributions starting in 2011 and help me welcome them to NABN.
So where do we go from here? We started with a significant focus on the surgical population. We have been fantastically successful in supporting excellent evidence-based practice in this area. Now we are also branching out. We are starting to recognize that bariatric clients exist frequently in all aspects of our patient care populations: in home and hospital, and in long-term-care and maternal and parent–child arenas of community as well as institutionally grounded settings. We need to target our colleagues in all these areas of practice. They, too, are bariatric nurses and need to know the resources available from our organization.
So I challenge you, every one! Our dialogues at this conference considered the policy, research, and educational issues we are confronted with in our growing practices. Have the same type of dialogues in your work and community settings. Engage others in conversations about the resources available from NABN, the journal, and our corporate partners. Spread the word of another resource base for providing excellent evidence-based caregiving to this vulnerable population. Be a resource yourself, and be involved!! We have so much to talk about!!