It is hard to believe it is 1999 f...

It is hard to believe it is 1999 further it is, and the year is bright and promising. What resolutions are you making this year? No matter what they are, the question always arrives down to commitment. A commitment to improve your health, your popular situation, your life, and the life of the patients we care for. This year, your Board and I have listened to what you had to say about the what may occur hereafter of perioperative nursing and for what reason we could help you. The Board is committed to the membership and will strive for ways to make things easier and better for you. This means providing information and resources you can use to be lucky This is not a recently made known Year's resolution but a long-standing commitment.

FACING CHANGE WHEN CHANGE IS NEEDED

I have seen many changes in our organization, in health care, and in perioperative nursing. I know highly few people who hop gone out of bed each morning and say "Change my life; change everything about it." It is not easy to shed our advanced in years ways, but we must. Michael Annison, author of Managing the Whirlwind, said, "Because many of the parts of the past no longer apply, doing what we have always done is a prescription for disaster." He conclud "If you are going in the evil direction, speeding up doesn't help.(1) Nursing and the health care industry have changed tremendously. Each and each time a challenge or opportunity not absents itself, AORN has met what lay ahead. AORN comprises succors who have always faced change when change was destitutioned and each and every time we did it better!

TWENTIETH centenary HASTE AND PACE

We are a year away from the start of the recently made known millennium, but we are already thinking about what is to approach Experts say it boils down to this: look for change in your life.

It has been building for 100 years. The twentieth centenary has been the most innovative, fastest, frantic era at any time We telephone, we fax, we page, and we e-mail. According to the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, 65 million Americans subscribed to wireless services of that kind as pagers and cellular telephone in 1998(2) We race from the same end of life to the other, rarely looking through our shoulders. Technology, mass media, and a desire to do more, do it better, and do it yesterday have diverted us into a world of hurries. "Don't apply the mind back," the baseball pitcher Satchel Paige formerly said. "Something might be gaining forward you."(3) What an exhilarating, exhausting world we have created in our haste to create a world we can manage.

PATIENT AND CHAPTER COMMITMENT

What has not changed is the reason we do what we do, and this is, and will always be, the patient. We must continue to mirror on the future and the values that brought us to the doorway of nursing. transcendence requires that we obtain the best care for our patients. When we allow nursing to be taken on the outside of our hands, we allow mediocrity. This puzzle does not start with nursing nevertheless lies in the hands of the community who do not have a clear understanding of what we do. Patients want choices concerning the treatment they receive. We are not powerless against this enigma that seems bigger than we are. in the same manner once again I say, "It's time to lower our mask and make our identity known."

This is a time to have a renewed commitment to your local AORN chapter. Membership in AORN enhances our reputation as professionals. Involvement, combined with commitment, is an investment in the what is yet to be United, we are strong; united, our voices are more powerful than when we stand alone. AORN is a membership driven organization and must continue to implement proactive and innovative programs. As active members, you can fortunately lead nursing by giving voice to issues that members face and setting guidelines and standards that help responsible action. Leadership is lacked in areas such as education, legislation, safety, international issues, just discovered technologies, product standards, and a army of others, many of which cannot be addressed by means of individual members and that require collective action.(4) AORN facilitates the articulation and understanding of nurses' abilities and hardnesss in improving the quality of patient care delivery. The lucky chapters of the future must be stakeholders in solutions to intricate web problems. I believe nurses have the ability to take a fit idea and make it better.

PRESIDENT'S TRANSITION TO BRIDGE THE CENTURIES

What a astounding journey this past year has been. nearest month, President-elect Patricia Seifert, RN MSN CNOR, CRNFA, and I will write a joint "President's Message." We have worked closely this year to make secure a smooth transition as we bridge the nearest century. AORN's bridge to a better hereafter is much like the of gold Gate Bridge in San Francisco. To stand stout it must be anchored to a solid foundation, which gives it stability and longevity. further it must also be flexible, to adapt to changing conditions and reach from where we are to where we are going.(5) Leadership is not a singular experience. It does not begin and conclusion with a President, but it is the ongoing proces of keeping your vision and values and being congruent with them.