President's Message

The Mentor, Volume 14, Number 1, 2003

Prelude to Planning

When the NONPF Board developed the current strategic plan for the organization, the Board devoted considerable time in the planning process to conducting an assessment of the external environment. This process of assessing what is happening in nurse practitioner education, nursing, and health care at large at any moment in time and forecasting for the several years beyond is critical to the task for laying out a three-year, organizational strategic plan. Since the strategic plan reflects the Board’s vision for the directions the organization must take to stay focused on its mission, it must evolve from a process of information gathering and sharing.

The focus of the 2003 NONPF Annual Meeting – “Forces of Change in Nurse Practitioner Education” – is timely as the Board begins the early stages of developing the next three-year strategic planning cycle for NONPF. Information presented and discussed during this meeting will be essential to the Board’s consideration of the membership’s concerns and the external environment. The annual meeting features timely presentations by noted speakers in higher education, health care, and nursing education which will help the organization to identify those “blips” on our radar screens which may become major forces in health care.

Of equal importance is the dialogue among our members during the meeting. As with the first meetings of NP educators in the 1970s, this 29^th Annual Meeting brings together faculty who share the accountability in promoting quality NP education. The insights of faculty from various programs across the country are critical towards shaping NONPF’s vision for the future, and the NONPF annual meeting is the forum for unfettered exchange of information, concerns, and innovations. As re-stated in the current issue of the Harvard Business Review, “Good communication, or free communication, within or between people is always therapeutic” (Rogers, C.R & Roethlisberger, HBR, Nov-Dec 1991).

Many of the current initiatives that we will address during the annual meeting are direct outcomes of the dialogue at earlier annual meetings. For example, the Q-NONPF consultative service evolved from significant discussions by the membership about the need to promote quality in NP programs. The Program of Excellence emerged from this same discussion, as did our work to promote the implementation of the national, consensus-based evaluation standards for all NP programs - the Criteria for Evaluation of Nurse Practitioner Programs – into the existing accreditation process. Discussions about international issues directed our efforts in establishing linkages abroad and led to further discussion of APN/NP educational issues at the national and international levels.

What will the next three-year strategic plan hold for NONPF? We still have many months ahead for the planning process, but the discussions in April will yield significant information from the perspectives of the NONPF membership. The membership can help set the course through open discussion of current and future initiatives for the organization. The challenge then passes to your elected leadership to turn this membership feedback into the organization’s strategic plan.

If you have not yet planned to attend the annual meeting in Philadelphia, I urge you to reconsider. The format of the meeting has been altered to accommodate discussion among the members in order to inform the NONPF board as it prepares to revisit the strategic plan and put the membership’s vision for the organization into action. As has often been said: “Those who show up get to decide.”

If it is not possible for you to join us, we still want to hear from you. You will soon be getting an email from NONPF asking you to answer a short questionnaire. The answers to these questions will be collated and shared at the annual meeting as we discuss future directions for the organization.

I look forward to seeing you in Philadelphia.