EAUN: Latest developments in fast changing environment

I am pleased and honoured to be able to address you as your new chair, since the ratification of my candidacy by the members at the AGM on 4 September last at the EAUN21 Virtual Meeting. We are living in challenging times, but I will do all that is in my power to step in the shoes of my predecessor and by following her excellent example lead the EAUN to an even stronger organisation to support urology nurses across the world.

“…our social media group will be reaching out more frequently to our members.”

Accreditation
The EAUN has been working with the EU-ACME on the development of an accreditation system for online and face to face education. Besides offering online education ourselves, we want to include other organisations that offer useful and accessible education to our urology nurses. So educators and organisers of Education Events for urology nurses worldwide are invited to apply for accreditation. Accredited education will appear in the event
calendar at www.EU-ACME.org.

Social media
As our EAUN members live all around the globe, we are often faced with very different challenges in different continents, but sharing these experiences is vital to all our learning. COVID-19 has reiterated how important it is to ensure we keep everyone updated quickly about changes in the field. By using all communication platforms and channels to promote and share information with our members who follow us on social media, our social media group will be reaching out more frequently to our members. This conduit of communication includes articles, advertising our education programmes and sharing new developments and guidelines that we hope everyone will find useful.

Guidelines
Our guidelines are recognised as best practice, and we are always very proud when we write a new guideline or update one as we know how valuable they are to nursing teams. The guidelines are very time consuming for the experts who kindly offer their knowledge and help write or review them, as it entails doing extensive data extraction and reviewing the published work. Due to the time and demand, it takes to write guidelines, we have devised a plan and expanded our resources to gain more expertise to help with each subspeciality area in urology. We have, put a time framework in place to help with the planning and updating of guidelines.

EAUN long-term strategy
One of the new board responsibilities is to provide urology nurses and allied professionals further support by sharing good practice and initiating global collaboration and networking. The long-term strategy is currently being reviewed and adapted to fit in with this fast changing environment we are all experiencing. You will find this on our website in the near future and read about it in this newsletter. The start of this decade was not what we hoped for, but I will end by saying a massive thank you to all EAU and EAUN members for your selfless, hard work and resilience during incredibly difficult times. I appreciate the support you gave each other, your families and your patients.

Mrs. Paula Allchorne, RN, Executive MBA – Health Service Management, EAUN Chair, London (GB) p.allchorne@eaun.org