My Term on the National Council on Education

from 2023 INSider May/June

Meet the Inaugural DEI Scholarship Winner

by Susan Lown, DNP, RN, CNE

As a dedicated lifelong learner, the opportunity to serve on INS’s National Council on Education (NCOE) presented itself as meaningful way to both apply and expand my existing clinical expertise. My blended professional roles as nursing professor, home infusion nurse, and member of a hospital vascular access team continuously challenge me to remain abreast of best practices in both education and infusion nursing. Upon learning of an opening on the NCOE, I speculated that serving as a member of the Infusion Nurses Society’s education team would become one of my favorite forms of scholarship. Now at the end of my term, I can conﬁdently say that my conjecture was conﬁrmed.

The NCOE members are a group of dedicated INS infusion nurses who value and promote ongoing education in the specialty practice of infusion therapy. NCOE members serve a three-year term, which allows sufficient time for learning the role, with new members working closely with a mentor during the first year, then further developing the role over the next two years of service. Working collaboratively under the leadership of INS’s director of clinical education, NCOE members participate in the planning and delivery of the educational components of the annual INS meeting. Once responses from INS’s call for abstracts have been collected, the NCOE meets to evaluate which topics will best fill existing practice gaps and meet the educational needs of the diverse INS membership. NCOE members then interview prospective presenters and further consider the topic and its suitability for the annual meeting. Once selected presenters have been invited to present their topic at the meeting, NCOE members work one on one with the presenters to build and refine their presentation. NCOE members are then sponsored by INS to attend and facilitate the annual meeting on a rotating basis in order to ensure, alongside other INS staff members, that the meeting runs smoothly.

In 2021, I traveled to Las Vegas for INS 2021, and this year, I worked the INS 2023 meeting in Boston. The opportunity to witness the outcome of months of labor has been tremendously rewarding for me. At the meetings, NCOE members are assigned sessions to moderate and also meet intermittently throughout the meeting to discuss details as needed. While members remain busy moderating sessions throughout the day, there is also ample time to meet with vendors and explore the meeting hotel and city highlights in the evening. And at least once during the span of the meeting, the director of clinical education reserves a table at one of the hotels’ well-known restaurants and gathers all the NCOE members together for either a lunch or dinner, providing an opportunity to informally mingle and socialize. Once the meeting has ended, the NCOE members meet to debrief, making note of successes and opportunities for improvement for the next meeting, as it is then time to begin planning for the next annual meeting once again.

As a native New Yorker, now residing in Indiana, I was excited to work with an infection prevention expert from Manhattan at INS 2022. This clinician was presenting on how their team approached central line-associated bloodstream infection (CLABSI) prevention strategies during the COVID-19 surge. Because I had lived and worked in Manhattan during my early years of practice, the collaborative relationship I developed with the presenter was special: we met virtually several times to strengthen the presentation, which also strengthened our relationship. As a colleague and coach, it is natural for NCOE members to develop a mutual bond with our presenters, as we become just as vested in their success as they are.

Returning home following four days of intensive collaborative learning at an annual meeting is a grand opportunity to share what you have learned with colleagues, and in my case, my nursing students. This in turn seemed to spark the home team to pursue ideas and consider ways to implement practice changes that promote optimal patient outcomes. So, as you can see, the process is ongoing and cyclical, generating a keen sense of ownership and accomplishment in one’s role in infusion nursing.

In addition to an NCOE member’s role in the annual meeting, they may encounter scholarly opportunities during their term of service. For example, in 2021, prior to the publication of the 8th edition of the Infusion Therapy Standards of Practice, INS invited NCOE members to serve on a panel of individuals across health care specialties from 17 countries around the world as peer reviewers. The honor of serving on this panel was notably a signiﬁcant milestone in my infusion nursing career.

My three-year term of service will come to an end once any outstanding details of INS 2023 have been resolved. The culture of the NCOE has been extremely collegial and collaborative, and INS has supported and respected myself and other members as contributors to the development and execution of the annual meeting. I am only one person, making small differences one at a time, but as an NCOE member I have been an integral part of something larger than myself.

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