Theresa Davis, PhD, RN, NE-BC, FAAN (BSN ’98, MSN ’02, PhD Nursing ’13), took on a new leadership role this summer, as she became president of the American Association of Critical Care Nurses (AACN) on July 1. She will serve a one-year term as leader of the organization that advocates for the role of acute and critical care nurses in the health care system.
Davis’s theme for her presidency is “Rising Together,” which she says is a rallying call for nurses to lift each other up and manifest their future as a profession. “My message is around the importance of family presence, healthy work environments, and nursing having a bold voice in health care design,” she said.
At AACN’s National Teaching Institute conference in May, Davis shared with attendees her personal experience of becoming the patient’s family member, which happened last year when her husband unexpectedly died. She told the audience that she was initially not allowed in the emergency room where he was being treated. It was the intervention of an empathetic staff member that enabled her to be with her husband in his final moments. Davis told the audience that the moment was eye-opening.
“As nurses, we have the power to rise together, to advocate, to open the doors for patients’ families in these critical moments,” she said to the crowd. Rising together, she told them, means that nurses can help to meet “the needs of our teams, our patients, and their families.”
Davis, who was the College’s 2015 Alumna of the Year, is the assistant vice president of nursing at Inova Health System’s High Reliability Center in Falls Church, Virginia. Her clinical specialties are trauma and neuro critical care and teleICU. She led Inova’s implementation of teleICU as clinical operations director from 2004 to 2021. She also helped to implement the Teledisaster Program in nine hospitals across Northern Virginia in partnership with the Northern Virginia Hospital Alliance in 2009 and 2010. She has served as an adjunct faculty member at Mason and for Shenandoah University.
The presidency is Davis’s latest volunteer leadership role in the profession. At AACN, she has served as a board director, the organization’s treasurer, and, for the past year, as the president-elect, among other roles. She is a past chair of the American Telemedicine Association’s TeleICU Special Interest Group and is a member of the Virginia Nurses Association, Sigma’s Epsilon Zeta Chapter, and the Society of Critical Care Medicine. She is also a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing.