Resilience and triumph describe our chapter year. We scrambled to find a new meeting room for our November 17 lecture because the Ford Office Building, our customary home, was in tumult with the arrival of Tea Party Freshmen congressmen. Our resourceful Vice-President, Charlotte Carneiro, found us a conference room at the Department of Labor and saved the day. Grateful though we were for the hospitality of the Department of Labor, the conference room was a little too small for our typical attendance. This prompted Karen Barry to find a bigger space for us at the National Geographic M Street Building, where we have had our January, March, and May meetings in comfortable, high tech surroundings. Many thanks to Charlotte and Karen, and to the resilient members who manage to find us wherever we are!
We experimented with electronic elections this year, posting our ballot on Survey Monkey, a project spearheaded by Rebecca Jahandari and Claudia Beach; the result was a 89% response rate. Plus it saved work and money! Another experiment was partnering with Disney Institute and Anne Arundel Community College in Promoting "Disney's Approach to Quality Service For Health Care Professionals" a one day training on January 11. I attended this training and it was truly "outside of the box" - not enough space to discuss it here but feel free to talk to me about it.
We were one of 4 local OHN chapters who joined the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Education and Research Center to produce the Regional Occupational Health Conference on October 2, 2010. With an attendance of 110, the conference netted our chapter $2,093. Applause is warranted for the six members of MWAOHN who worked on the ROHC.
With a healthy bank balance, the board decided to send two people to the AAOHN National Conference: Karen Barry, a hard working board member, and another member we would select by raffle qualification. To qualify for the raffle, candidates had to 1) be active members of AAOHN with MWAOHN as their chapter designation and, 2) attend 3 of the 4 remaining meetings of the year. The winner of the raffle was Esmee Swann. Joining these two were 5 others from this chapter: Barbara Hayden, Denise James, Angela Ward, Rochelle Vinson, and Deborah Garrison, who won a scholarship from AAOHN to attend. This has got to be a record turn-out and the first time the DC bench at the Association's annual business meeting was full.
At the National Conference, we were happy to hear that AAOHN has moved into full financial solvency after being on the brink of bankruptcy in 2009. Transferring administrative functions to Darcy & Associates, though uncomfortable at first, has saved our national organization. The national membership is around 5300, a small percentage of the approximately 52,000 OHNs in the USA. Our own chapter has grown to 42 members so we can consider ourselves part of the solution. We can help AAOHN and ourselves by recruiting even more OHNs to join; to do this, we have to make membership worthwhile.
And that is the challenge I close with: how can we make sure that belonging to MWAOHN/AAOHN is worthwhile?
Respectfully Submitted, Barbara Hayden, RN, COHN-S May 16, 2011