The members view the AANA, Council on Accreditation (COA) and National Boards for Certification and Recertification of Nurse Anesthetists (NBCRNA) as one organization, though autonomous, as responsible for our profession’s future. Each has unique responsibilities and mission, each serves our profession as we serve our patients. We must collaborate to understand our shared challenges to create robust solutions looking at the multifaceted environment we practice in.  The AANA, COA and NBCRNA recognize the need to define our connections. As a beginning, I have had the honor of being the AANA Board liaison with the Council on Accreditation as an attendee of their Board’s open session.  The COA Board is diverse and passionate about the excellence of our education programs and graduates. 

However, let me summarize my position here.  The Continuing Professional Competency (CPC) program is necessary and too long delayed.  We should have done something like this 10 years ago.  I feel this failure of the NBCRNA to bring about an update to our certification in a timely manner, and the acrimonious rollout of the program that was finally put together, is a direct result of a misguided focus on autonomy from, instead of collaboration with, the AANA.  

Autonomy in the matter of specific types of decision-making by our organizational affiliates is important- but our organizational affiliates have let an overwrought concern for autonomy overtake their main mission.  The NBCRNA and the COA were created and exist solely to serve the specialty of Nurse Anesthesia – and not the interests as they conceive them, but as the specialty conceives them.  How can a self-perpetuating board of 11 people, even if a majority of them are CRNAs, ever hope to understand and anticipate the needs and advances of 44,000 actively practicing CRNAs, who are always and everywhere changing the content and expanding the boundaries of our practice?  The statement that they exist to serve the public is a red herring- the public is best served by a concerted, collaborative effort rather than the silly turf-battles we have recently seen.

The NBCRNA and the COA exist to make sure that as CRNA practice expands and evolves, the graduates of our schools and our practitioners are prepared and competent to undertake these advances.  And the only way they can do that is by collaborating closely with the professional organization that represents 90% of practicing CRNAs – the AANA. Indeed, the NBCRNA and the COA should consider themselves uniquely fortunate among credentialing bodies for advanced nursing practice, because most advanced nursing practice specialty organizations represent a far lower percentage of practitioners, thus making their jobs much more difficult.

Far from seeking to distance themselves from the AANA, the NBCRNA and the COA should instead be seeking ways to ever more closely collaborate with the AANA, all the while maintaining the minimum required autonomy- because they can rest assured, given the AANA’s overwhelming membership of their “community of interest”, that they will thereby most closely follow the actual needs and progress of our specialty.