OUR PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE 

Meet Your New President Melony Carlton, RN, MSN

Hello everyone and welcome to the New Year.  This is my first term as President and it is preceded by serving on the board as a director for the past 2 year’s then as the president elect for one year.  I am surprised that being a director did not take as much time out of my life and away from work as I thought it would.  Actually, I was continually learning so if anything, it made my LNC business grow.  It has been a great experience and I look forward to the coming year serving as your president. 

The Greater Sacramento Area Chapter (GSAC) was organized in 1995 chartered in 1996 and continues to grow. At present we have 34 members.  GSAC is a ‘grass roots’ organization driven by the members who provide input to the board for our educational sessions, sharing of expertise, networking, and vision of our chapter and its goals.  Some of our members have been nurses for a few years and some have been nurses for 35+ years.  As Legal Nurse Consultants some of our members are new to the field and some have over 15 years of experience.   As our membership grows so do the opportunities as our members sub-specialize in many different areas of Legal Nurse Consulting. 

One goal that we have been striving to fulfill is to encourage members to attend the board meetings so that we can better support all of our members needs.  Last year we started having our board meetings after our educational sessions which resulted in more members attending the meetings. The board wants to hear what issues are most important to the members, and attending the meetings is a great way to voice your needs and suggestions.  Our meetings are posted on our web site; www.gsac-aalnc.org, as well as the news letters and other beneficial information.  This year our meetings are scheduled for January 13^th, March 12^th, June 10^th, and September 17^th.  AALNC’s annual meeting is in April and our year-end party will be in November or December. 

Our January 13^th meeting is a ‘show and tell’ format.  Our experienced LNC’s will share tips of the trade, how to get started as an LNC, and elements of the different sub-specialty areas within the LNC specialty.  We have six LNC members presenting their tips and McGeorge School of Law will present the idea of having a mock trial later this year with our chapter.  This meeting is open to non-members as well as members and those just interested in learning more about our area of practice. 

January tip: Join a list serve.  Are you on a list serve?  Do you know what a list serve is?  A list serve is an electronic version of people sharing information regarding a topic that is of common interest. Our list serves are comprised of knowledgeable LNC’s, physicians, and attorney professionals sharing a wealth of information by posting and networking a large variety of questions such as definitions of a medical/legal words, finding an LNC in a specialty area, reporting on new medical/legal legislation, clarification on a specific issue, and many, many more topics.  Some list serves have thousands of members and some have hundreds.  This does not mean you will get thousands of email’s; it is the opposite.  Each list serve has a mentor (or owner) that screens all of the postings and monitors content on a continual basis.  You can choose a digest form that summarizes the issues presented and discussed or receive all of the discussion as it occurs.  Of course the most important one is with our professional organization, AALNC, and listed on the AALNC webpage.  To find this list serve go to (www.aalnc.org/), Login, sign on, click on ecommunities (left side of page under welcome (your name)).  Two others list serves are Legal, Medical & Forensic Professionals at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/legalmed/ and Legal Nurse Consulting Listserv at http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/LegalNurseConsultingListserv/.  You must apply to become a member and you will need a sponsor.  There are many others that are run very well. If you’d like to try one, send me an email and I will be happy to sponsor you.

Send me your feedback; let me know what GSAC can do to help and support you as an up and coming, or know-ledgeable and experienced LNC.

Melony Carlton, RN, MSN

President, GSAC – AALNC          

Member Activities: 

   Congratulations to Kathy Wagner who has completed her BSN this month of January 2009.    

  On December 15, 2008 Teresa Cox, Melony Carlton and Mariann Cosby attended a local luncheon put on by Cvent, an event management company.   Cvent is an online software suite which includes event management solution, an event sourcing tool and a full-featured web survey application.  It's purpose is to give an organization online tools to manage all of their meetings, events and surveys.  The primary tool that Cvent can offer GSAC now is their Supplier Network in which we can search their data base for venues or sevice providers; search by location, total meeting space and other criteria.  This tool is currently provided at no cost to us.   Cvent does provide some tools that could benefit us all as our organization grows.