The three keynote and general session speakers shared inspirational and motivational ideas for attendees to take back to their emergency departments when they leave Annual Conference.

Juliet Funt, daughter of Candid Camera’s Allen Funt, presented Thursday’s Keynote Address: Overcommitted, Overwhelmed and Over It!

“The number one lifestyle complaint in America is that we have too much to do and too little time,” said Funt. “We live in what I like to call the culture of insatiability—we are addicted to quantity, even in the language we use: shop till you drop, bottomless cup, all you can eat. We go, go, go all day, and when our head hits the pillow at night, we think, ‘What else could I have done or bought to be even more impressive?’”

Funt shared her tools for relieving stress in our everyday lives, including CCPP—being calm, confident, patient and present. “If you can be calm, confident, patient and present in the middle of the frenzy, what a beautiful gift to give,” she said.

CCPP has special application for emergency nurses, she said. “Your patients need you when they come in to the emergency department logistically, but they really need you emotionally,” noted Funt. “If you can become a calm place of presence for your patients, it will go so much farther than if you come at them from a place of trying to get through all the problems of the day at one time.”

Funt also advised attendees to look for the white spaces in their lives—the little blocks of open time that occur in between the events of their day—where they can appreciate and see the beauty of what they do.

“When you’re in a crisis, it’s everybody’s job to put their hands on the oars and pull on the paddles,” said Friday’s General Session Speaker Joe Tye, who delivered The Florence Prescription. “We can’t afford to have anybody say, ‘This is not my job.’”

Tye related the history of how Florence Nightingale, from her experience in caring for soldiers suffering brutal injuries on the battlefront, created the blueprint for the hospital system we have today. She established the first medical records system and was the first to recognize the importance of nutrition and cleanliness in creating a healing environment. Although Nightingale would have been blown away by our modern health care system, she would have agreed that it is in a crisis, said Tye.

“We are forgetting the spirit and mission of purpose that drove Florence Nightingale,” he said. “We are losing our soul, and we need to reclaim our soul.”

Reclaiming our soul in health care comes from creating an inner sense of ownership. Tye shared the eight essential characteristics of the culture of ownership: commitment, engagement, passion, initiative, stewardship, belonging, fellowship and pride. He shared how an Arizona hospital implemented these eight characteristics in their ED and within three months eliminated many of the negative influences in their department.

“The work we do is privileged work, and you are called to do that work every day,” said Jeff Doucette, RN, MS, CEN, FACHE, NEA-BC, who delivered Saturday’s Closing Address: Privileged Interruption: A Call for Caring. “Regardless of how or where you practice, each one of us has the opportunity to be extended this privilege every day.”

Patients don’t come to the ED because they want to—they come because their lives were interrupted, and emergency nurses are privileged to be a part of that, he said.

“We’ve all worked with someone who’s been on the job a little too long,” said Doucette. “Those kind of people are nice because they have to be, and they do not understand that they’ve been given a privilege.”

Doucette pointed out that everyone in the room was a leader, whether he or she led from an office or from the bedside.

“People who are not leaders do not come to conferences like this,” he said. “The people who are constantly complaining, they’re the ones working so that you can be here.”

Choosing to lead from wherever you are in an organization is about how you choose to take care of yourself, the people you care for and your colleagues, said Doucette. He shared three tips attendees needed to do to keep themselves whole in the face of all the stress in their lives: Know and nurture your person, find your passionate purpose and pursue your passion.

A.C.A.