Star Search

2023 Aspire Convention

Star Search

2023 Aspire Convention |  March 14-17, 2023 |  Hyatt Regency - Atlanta, GA

On Thursday, March 16, four aspiring speakers competed for an opportunity to present a concurrent session at the 2024 Aspire Convention. Congratulations to the 2023 ANPD Star Search Winner, Peta-Kaye Johnson who will be presenting her session, "Driving Change with Simulation," at next year's convention!


2023 Star Search Participants

Catana Phillips, MSN, RN, CEN, TCRN

Escaping Boredom

Audience Level: Competent

Have you ever found yourself counting down the minutes until the end of a boring lecture? Learn how to escape boredom and make learning fun! This activity will highlight the use of tabletop escape rooms to provide high-quality evidence-based education that enhances professional nursing practice and fosters interprofessional development.

Colleen Grose, MSN, RN, CPN

Healthy Heart vs. Wounded Heart in Precepting New Nurses

Audience Level: Competent

This session will mimic a preceptor development class that focuses on the importance of having a healthy heart as a nurse preceptor.  We will do a deep dive into nurse preceptor burnout. Individuals will review the latest research, learn how to assess their unique stress and burnout indicators, reflect on how this influences their ability to teach others, and gain a deeper understanding of why having a healthy heart as a nurse preceptor benefits individual, unit-based, and organization-level outcomes.  Participants will leave the presentation with a method for instilling this preceptor development in their own institutions.

Peta-Kaye Johnson, MSN, RN, CEN, CNL

Driving Change with Simulation

Audience Level: Novice

The session will review a small Simulation Center's successes, including reducing patient falls with injury, increasing confidence around massive hemorrhage events, and fostering interprofessional collaboration. Attendees will hear a beginner's approach to engaging stakeholders and staff in Simulation-Based Education Initiatives during a time of staffing shortages, experience-complexity gap, and disengagement within nursing.

Sarah Meyer, MSN, RN, PHN, NPD-BC

Preceptor Incentives: Which Incentives REALLY Make a Difference?

Audience Level: Novice

Nurse retention and satisfaction have a spotlight in the healthcare world. The Great Resignation and the COVID-19 pandemic have put a spotlight on existing issues in nursing, such as staffing instabilities, patient-nurse violence, and orientation inconsistencies. So much focus has navigated to orientation practices and creating networks for new employees, yet little is done to provide support to our preceptors responsible for much of this massive undertaking. This evidence-based practice project examined what preceptor incentives were most effective to assist in retention, satisfaction, and commitment (or re-commitment) to the preceptor role.


Be a Star

The purpose of ANPD's annual Star Search competition is to encourage aspiring speakers to compete for an opportunity to present a concurrent session at the next Aspire convention. Star Search is a great opportunity for novice speakers to develop their presentation skills!

Here's how the competition works:

  • The call for Star Search participants is now open! Four convention attendees will be selected to participate in Star Search during the 2023 Aspire Convention.
  • Each participant has 15 minutes total (we recommend 10 minutes for presentation content and 5 minutes for audience Q&A) to give a brief presentation that is judged by members of the ANPD Convention Content Planning Committee (CPC) and the audience.
  • The CPC score constitutes 75% of the total score and the audience score constitutes 25% of the total.
  • The participant who receives the highest score is invited to present a 60-minute concurrent session at the 2024 Aspire Convention in Chicago, IL the week of April 8, 2024 and receives one complimentary convention registration.

The call Star Search abstracts is now closed.

2022 Winner

Trauma-Informed Professional Development: Caring for the Caregivers
Presented by: Heidi Gilroy, PhD, RN, NPD-BC, EBP-C

There is growing awareness of the importance of mental health in nurses. Nursing professional development specialists are in a unique position to integrate mental health interventions into their usual activities to reach almost all nurses.