Back from the wilderness

It has been a long time since I have written in this blog. It has been a combination of ill health and being a way in New Zealand.
Firstly over 5 weeks ago now, I experienced some chest discomfort and of course immediately thought heart attack. Along with severe chest pain, came waves of anxiety and adrenaline. As those of you who know me know, I can usually manage fairly high levels of stress with equilibrium - so these feelings of anxiety were very foreign to me. After many tests, I was diagnosed with chostochondritis and instructed to take it easy for several weeks. It has been a testament to both my proactive board and my resourceful staff that APNA managed perfectly well without me for a number of weeks.
However, I am conscious that my absence coincided with a lot of e-mails from members regarding the new practice nurse funding. Whilst I tried to reply to as many as possible, I apologize to those of you who did not get a response. Needless to say I have taken on board all of your concerns especially from those of you in large practices, those of you who are enrolled nurses and in fact all of you who feel the incentive may adversely affect your role. The consultation process has not yet begun and we will be taking your concerns into those meetings.
After much debate, I decided to proceed with a long planned trip to New Zealand with our new President, Julianne Badenoch. The purpose of the trip was to attend the New Zealand primary health care nursing conference, where I was presenting a paper, and to visit some of our nursing colleagues working in primary health care. Julianne and I will be putting together a paper on what we learned but in brief we were totally inspired by both the roles of the nurses at the general practice level and the level of engagement of nurses in their primary health care organizations. Nurses are key members of their Boards, leaders of their health programs and writers of their business plans.
The conference was equally interesting in that it brought nurses from a range of primary health care settings together. It marked the beginning of their new New Zealand College of Primary Health Care Nursing and provided us with numerous examples of nurses providing innovative and best practice care, some of whom we hope to entice across to our conference.
The trip also provided Julianne and I the chance to chew the cud and establish good communication channels which will enable us to have the robust President-CEO relationship an effective organization needs.
Whilst I am still not feeling 100%, I am back at work. It has been a significant shock to realize that your body can really only take so much and I think this will be a positive in the long run. Like many of you, I am trying to balance a demanding career with raising teenage daughters and keeping all the family stuff semi-organized. Like many of you, I am passionate about what I do and frequently feel reluctant to let any opportunity to escape me or APNA. However what gets lost is time for myself and I am now looking at ways to make some lifestyle changes and get some more balance in my life. What I really need is a nurse in general pratice to provide me with some lifestyle risk factor management counselling!