Find Your Groove

APNA President Joyce Shea

This year, I’ve been excited to witness how the APNA community of psychiatric-mental health nurses has led the way toward improving lives and advancing care. The accomplishments are breathtaking to behold!

• The new APNA Scope & Standards of PMH Nursing Practice Council has been created to help RN and APRN members apply the full scope of their education and skillset to their practice.
• The APNA Graduate Faculty Toolkit from the great minds of the APNA Education Council – Graduate Branch was developed to bridge gaps in existing curricula.
• The APNA Position: Youth Suicide Prevention and new courses that supplement the APNA Suicide Prevention Certificate Program bolster suicide prevention for specific groups.
• Special issues of the Journal of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association and the APNA Restoring Workplace Safety Task Force focus on keeping nurses and those in their care safe.

All provide evidence that our association of professionals is on the move!

While the organization leads us forward, we can each find our groove as leaders, too. Throughout my presidency, I’ve encouraged you to recognize your ability to lead, innovate, and collaborate to shape the future of care. To conclude, I offer the roadmap below to help you commit to leadership and put it into action. It summarizes discussions we’ve had this year centered on my presidency’s theme, Empowered to Innovate and Collaborate: PMH Nurses Shaping Care Excellence. Whether this is new territory for you or something you’ve been at for years, I hope this roadmap helps focus your efforts.

Roadmap to Becoming a Care Excellence Officer

Tap Into Your Leadership Capabilities

1. What skills acquired through your education and training as a PMH nurse could you apply as a leader?
2. Which of the following qualities of a change agent do you personally identify most with?
   1. Supervisory ability
   2. Ability to influence others
   3. Social Intelligence
   4. Emotional Intelligence
   5. Decisiveness
   6. Ability to see the bigger picture
   7. Ability to achieve consensus
   8. Persistence
3. Which of these qualities, sought after in today’s leaders, would you like to embody as a leader:
   1. Authenticity
   2. Adaptability
   3. Resilience
   4. Empathy

Start to Identify Where You Might Innovate

1. When you think of innovation, what word or phrase comes to mind?
2. What type of innovation would you like to lead?
   1. An entirely new idea to apply to an existing system
   2. An existing approach that can be applied in a new way to your service area
3. Describe how your innovation might advance care excellence:
4. Define your potential goals:

Build Your Collaboration Plan

1. What type of collaborator are you?
   1. Introspective
   2. Relational
   3. Expressive
2. List out which departments and individuals might need to be involved in the collaboration to form a ‘collectively intelligent’ team:
3. Identify all key stakeholders – anyone who might be required for or impacted by your innovation:

Get Started on Shaping Care Excellence: A Checklist

☐ Engage with your identified collaborators to evaluate the strengths and challenges of your organization

☐ Share your thoughts on the next steps needed to move the quality of care forward

☐ Review the literature – or attend sessions at the APNA Annual Conference – to find alternative approaches that fit with your institution and the population you serve

Above all, consider becoming the change that you want to see, moving the world of mental health care toward care excellence.

I’ll share more during my President’s Address at the APNA Annual Conference in New Orleans. This special time with my APNA family fills me with energy as I engage with fellow nurses. It points to where I can serve most effectively and opens my mind to new approaches in care! I hope I’ll see you there and look forward to hearing your exciting ideas.
Serving as your APNA President this year has been an honor and a pleasure. I’m a proud psychiatric-mental health nurse and look forward to continuing to shape the future of care with you for many years to come.

Joyce Shea, DNSc, APRN, PMHCNS-BC, FAAN
President
American Psychiatric Nurses Association

Published September 2025