Paul Lacey, BSCN, RN, ENC(C) has spent much of his career educating fellow emergency nurses, with an eye for helping those new to the specialty become competent and confident in the unique environment of an emergency department. A new member of ENA’s Global Advisory Council, he also has a background in seeking commonalities among people regardless of where they live.
“I was essentially a new grad in the ED,” Lacey said, having started as an emergency nurse within a few months of earning his license. After about six years, he switched to the ICU, but gravitated back to the ED, and he became a nurse educator in 2009.
Lacey still thinks about how to help those new nurses in his role as Clinical Lead with the newly created Provincial Emergency Services at Ontario Health, a program intended to improve emergency services throughout the province. One of his current projects is to develop and provide virtual orientations and training to small, rural and remote locations that don’t have a nurse educator or sufficient resources.
“I could stay in the ED and plug holes or try to fix the whole bucket,” said Lacey. “We have to be hiring those new grads, so how can we get them up to speed and ready when they don’t have that two years med/surge experience to be able to understand what nursing is at its core and how to apply that to a fast-paced, rapid turnover environment that we all know and love?”
Emergency departments in Canada are not immune to the difficulties many hospitals around the world are facing.
Lacey joined ENA mainly for the subscription to Journal of Emergency Nursing that came with membership, he said, but he became more involved after attending first ENA annual conference – Emergency Nursing 2018 in Pittsburgh. When the event’s welcome party ended, he decided he wasn’t ready to call it a night.
“I turned to someone and said, ‘Where are you guys going?’” he recalled.
The person happened to be with a group of Indiana nurses, who immediately invited him to join them for the rest of the evening.
“Since then, Indiana became my ENA family,” he said.
His involvement in ENA grew. He attended more conferences, got involved in General Assembly, and he was appointed to the Global Advisory Council for a term that began this year. ENA also helped him meet more emergency nurses from Canada, which inspired him to get involved in the National Emergency Nurses Association in Canada.
Lacey’s interest in worldwide connections started when he was young, when he participated in an exchange program through CISV International, an organization that runs international camps and exchange experiences for children and teenagers with a mission of promoting peace. He lived with a host family in Finland, and later, as a volunteer leader he took campers to Brazil and the Netherlands. Coincidentally, he met Walter Lugari, ATCN, BSN, RN, of Germany, who also served on the Global Advisory Council, at an ENA annual conference. Lugari recognized Lacey’s name, and they realized they both were involved in CISV.
“ENA has become very important in my life, in my nursing career, and my professional identity,” he said. “The fact that there is so much focus on building international membership and strengthening that bond and community came at the right time.”