Recap of GPAC since August 2017!

The Greater Phoenix Area Chapter has had a very successful year. If you missed our July social event, you can read our re-cap below and get some of the details on our growth, accomplishments and goals going forward! 

Our board would like to see new and different talents become members and also be nominated for the 2019-2020 board. If you are interested, please reach out to any of us or attend the next meeting! 

GPAC Year in Review: July 2017-July 2018

The rebirth of GPAC of AACN continued with a call to meeting from Mary Carillo, in July 2017 "GPAC IS BACK". Many of us met at the Southern Rail and discussed the Chapter board and enjoyed a presentation from Edwards Life Sciences on Sepsis.

It was at this meeting that Christen Stevens was appointed Membership Director. One of her fist actions was to revitalize the GPAC Facebook Page, which has grown to 173 followers! Please support us by sharing our page with your friends and unit private pages if your hospital has one! We also appointed our Treasurer, Kassi Hyde and she worked at getting our finances in order. Ferride Haddad was also appointed Secretary at this meeting. So much was accomplished and we were off to a great start! 

This past year we have also been very fortunate to work with some very willing and generous vendors. Below is a list of our Monthly meetings and accomplishments:

August: Sponsored by Artic Sun - Educational and Dinner event

September: No meeting but alot of work was going on behind the scenes and it was obvious that we needed a better way to communicate and advertise GPAC events to nurses across Arizona.

October: Sponsored by NxStage - Educational and Dinner event. Mary Carrillo officially accepted the position as chapter President. She let no time laps and started planning for our AACN chapter advisor, Theresa Nino, to visit and help host our next event! 

November: Sponsored by GPAC/Held at MIHS - Theresa Nino was a guest speaker and led a presentation on Fatigue to Fantastic: Building Resiliency. At this meeting the board continued to grow and elected Tracy Thomas to be President Elect and Jennifer Brouwer to be the Website Administator. Carol Carpenter also joined as MIHS Liason. Kerry Knicos was appointed Community Liason. Theresa Nino helped lead this meeting in guiding us towards our goals. The attendees at this meeting and the board wanted a chapter that would bring education, networking, a place to de-stress with colleages and to also give back to the community. We talked about what our events would look like and how we could not only grow in numbers but in value. 

December: Board members gathered to assemble flyers and candy for all the ICUs around the valley to help spread the word that GPAC was back. We also donated and purchased $500.00 in gifts to the Angle Tree program! This meeting was instrumental in continuing with our goals for the chapter and at this meeting we discussed membership requirements, and launched our AACN Ambassador campaign. All members were assigned a month for the year of 2018 to arrange an event that will reflect our goals discussed in the November meeting.

January: Sponsored by Donor Network/Held at Honor Health Osborn - Education and Dinner event. New website was live with membership enrollment option and event registration. We also discussed the need for a GPAC email and estbalished the gpacaacn@gmail.com email address that was added to our website.

February: Sponsored by GPAC/Held at St Joseph with guest speaker Kimberly Post. This was a kick off for the AACN Ambassador campaign, and Kimberly presented an encouraging presentaiton with the goal to "Be Inspired, Become a Leader, and Impact Change". Being an Ambassador for AACN is a way to bridge the gap between the facility and ICU you work at and the AACN. This was a call to action and at this meeting Jennifer Meyers with Mayo Clinic, James Fowler and Marisa Riddle with MIHS, and Norma Barlow with Honor Health all become Ambassadors! We are still looking to grow this group, so please let us know if you are interested! 

March: Sponsored by Edwards Life Science: Hemodynamic Monitoring-Scenario Based Learning - Educational/Dinner. At this meeting we continued to work on future event planning. 

April: Sponsored by La Jolla Pharmaceuticals: Giapreza, a new drug to combat Sepsis. This event was held at The Henry and had a collaborative group of nurses, physicians and pharmacists that attended. 

May: Sponsored by Teleflex: Device Selection in the ICU. This event was held at Seasons 52. 

June: Sponsored by Impella: Impella platforms! At this meeting we re-visted our goals and decided to gear our July meeting towards a review of the year and a social gathering. We also discussed the process for nominating new board members, reviewed our membership growth and discussed the process for a chapter charter. It was also discussed to add 2 additional board member positions, a Marketing position and an Awards position. The Marketing position was discussed as a needed due to the extra work it took to create flyers, manage the FB page and respond to the emails. The Award position was discussed because we wanted someone to focus on specializing in what awards are available and what we could apply to. This position could also help facilities in learning how to apply for awards as well. At this meeting we also discussed the value of an Award-panel discussion meeting for Beacon. This is being held in September! 

July: Social event sponsored by GPAC - members were able to purchase discounted tickets for a viewing of "Bodies Revealed" followed by appetizers and refreshments at "the Views" restaurant within OdySea of Scottsdale. Carol Carpenter presented on our year in review, Jen Meyers discussed nomination/election process for GPAC board members and Christen Stevens presented on what the roles of board members are. They are all viewable on our facebook website page - as we went "Live" during the event! At this meeting, our current President Mary Carillo handed off the reins to Tracy Thomas, who is now the acting President! 

In summary, we've been a busy crew and we are thankful for your support! Here are our numbers for the past 12 months! 

9 Board Members 

4 Ambassadors

74 Active Members of GPAC

165 Follower of the GPAC website

173 FB followers

8 - Vendor educational events

2 - Guest Speaker/GPAC sponsored events 

$500.00 donation in community service

30 ICUs reached in our GPAC christmas candy and flyer 

We look forward to another great year with GPAC! If you are not a member, we want you to become one! Join us today and enjoy the benefits that we have discussed above. Also, give us your feedback and complete the Survey Monkey here!