Be BOLD

Por Sheryl Garriques-Lloyd

As the Biennium comes to a close, we have struggled to complete our Be BOLD project We have been encouraged to shine boldly personally and professionally We have been challenged to leave our nursing silos and explore other areas that impact on nursing and healthcare. As a chapter we are behind in deciding how we accept this challenge under three umbrellas within several countries. As we finalise our project or projects, it is comforting and encouraging the many ideas we have discussed to Being BOLD no matter where in nursing we are.

As members of Omega Kappa, we have embarked on Being BOLD through our service organisations, our institutions of work and through our chapter We started our activities from as far back as September 2021, with our annual participation in International Coastal Cleanup activities. Though the actual Cleanup day was not held in 2021, our chapter was happy to partner with the National Environmental Protection Agency in Jamaica We were able to present on Air Quality and its impact on Health. We also embarked on a virtual series to share current Infection Prevention and Control education which also facilitated continuing education hours for our nurses. These sessions were vital as we continued to battle a Pandemic The sessions were shared live and streamed to our YouTube channel which we also started in 2021

In 2022 we BOLDly embarked on a 16week Nursing Research Writing Workshop Series in collaboration with the Nurses Association of Jamaica We utilised the Google classroom to facilitate this exciting series. We had nurses from across four countries participating in the series to build nursing research capacity There are plans in progress to conduct a followup series to assist with presentations and publications. Research must be shared. We next embarked on a deep conversation about Retention Efforts to stem the challenge of Nurse Migration globally It was an enlightening and productive virtual webinar. Nurses are the largest group of workers in healthcare and the shortage has definitely been the largest human resource issue we continue to face.

Within the Pandemic as we continued our annual World Mental Health Day activities, we focused in 2022 on Mental Health For All and issued a 15Day Mental Health Challenge to our colleagues globally to spend the next