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President's Call for "Paul Revere's from Each Chapter ! !

Last Friday afternoon, CAPRN's executive director and I had an indepth telephone conversation. We analyzed the success of the medical physicians and their approach to getting powerful legislative acts passed as well as communicating with their legislatures.

They use a simple approach that we are going to emulate. Each UAPRN Chapter will have a designated political person/liason (a "Paul Revere-like individual") who will be charged with one major responsibility. It is being this important person that is vital for our legislative success. This "Paul Revere" or legislative liason will be represented in each chapter. Once CAPRN sends that person the alert  the entire APRN goes into a "project legislative emergency alert" state. That designated person will have the extremely important task of sending an eblast to the persons who are saved on their cell phone or computer or tablet etc. folder.

These persons do not have to be APRNs but may include your housekeeper, colleagues from work, your babysitter, your daycare provider,  your spouse, your parents etc. Any adult that you can rely on to do this for you and APRNs in Georgia should be included in this folder of individuals.  This is the one time that quanitiy over quality matters.

Once the alert is received from CAPRN, the UAPRN chapter designated person jumps into action and sends the eblast out asking these already identified persons, as quickly as possible, to communicate via an email, telephone call, text, etc. to their appropriate state official to ask for his/her support or non support. All the message has to say is in the headline ......." vote Yes vote No for House Bill xxx or Senate Bill xxx ".

The state official then starts receiving this abundance of requests to vote a certain way on this upcoming bill. His/her staff members then notifies the legislator immediately of what is happeneing by calling him/her out from the chamber to give an update of what his/her voters are requesting.

We are going to try this attack as it appears to be working for the medical community. What this will require is the following:

1. a designated person from each chapter and his/her cell phone number be provided to CAPRN; 2. the designated person has the capacity in his/her cell phone to relay this important emergency legislative message to a large folder of individuals. This folder of individuals will already have been composed before the alert. This is crucial !! 3. that designated person will be able to take 3 to 5 minutes to stop and send the alert out; 4. those persons who receive the alert will be reliable enough to follow through and communicate with their already identified state officials.

Does our membership think we can do this ? I believe this is a different yet aggressive and proactive approach to having important legislation passed. CAPRN has promised me that it will only communicate this emergency alerts when an important bill is up for voting by the house or the senate. They will not use this form of communication as updates but reserve that for standard emails. This will only be used for a "Paul Revere" emergency eblast of "to arms, to arms, let's take action now!" message and no other.

Can we collectively agree to do this as an organization and raise our presence and participate in the political arena, as I discussed last week on the state-wide conference call ?

If our membership can think of other ways to disseminate thIS type of emergency news with effective results, I welcome your feedback in posting your comments on this site.

Thank you ahead of time for your diligence and participation!

Dr. James F. Lawrence

UAPRN State President