Covering the Indiana State Nurses Association 2019 Annual Convention

On Friday, September 20, I’ll be attending the 2019 annual convention of the Indiana State Nurses Association in Indianapolis, Indiana. As I did recently with the Emerging Trends in Nursing conference at Indiana Wesleyan University in June, I’d like to provide live coverage of the ISNA convention via Twitter. As before, I plan to post a summary and debriefing of the conference following the convention.

This coverage will be another departure from the once-a-week posting pattern I’ve established here on Morning Vitals. I’ll be trying my hand at event coverage once again, and I hope to apply what I learned in the process of covering the Emerging Trends conference.

The convention theme or tagline this year is “One Profession, Many Careers.” The keynote speakers will include Ernest J. Grant, PhD, RN, FAAN, who is the current President of the American Nurses Association, and David Griffiths, MBA, BS, who is Senior Vice President, Healthcare Division of Aon Affinity. Other presenters this year will be speaking on various topics related to novel or unconventional nursing occupations, including nurse navigator, insurance authorization nurse, and faith community nurse. Also on the agenda are a members meeting, exhibitors, and a fundraiser for the Indiana Nurses Foundation.

This will be the first time I’ll have attended the ISNA convention, and I’m looking forward to learning from the experience and collecting a few continuing education contact hours as well, if any are offered. At least as important, I hope to network with other nurses and learn how to become more involved in the policy and leadership arena.

One thing I’ll be curious about: whether or not live Twitter coverage from this convention will be as straightforward as it seemed to be from the Emerging Trends conference. This ISNA event being called a convention, complete with a members meeting, I anticipate it will be more formal than the Emerging Trends conference. Given that, there may be cause for me to cover the convention in something other than real time. We shall see.

Again, I hope to you’ll be interest enough to follow along with my event coverage. I hope the topics of the convention encourage further dialogue here on Morning Vitals.