Meet the new AORN President

AORN Journal,  April, 2004  by Nancy K. Kuehl

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Fate has a way of changing even the best laid plans, and it often leads individuals in the direction they were destined to go. That is the case with AORN's new President William J. Duffy, RN, BSN, MJ, CNOR. Nursing has brought a lot into Bill Duffy's life, including his wife, but there was a time when nursing as a career was not even a blip on his horizon.

Born and bred on the south side of Chicago, Duffy grew up in a boisterous household as the middle child of seven. His father was a police officer, and Duffy always planned to become a cop too. A spot of trouble one day led him down a different path--the one that led to nursing.

A LIFE-CHANGING EVENT

As a teenager hanging around on a street corner with his friends, Duffy found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Luckily, I was just on the fringe of it," says Duffy. That night, however, his worried mother took him aside and asked him to consider volunteering at the same hospital where his sister Ann was a candy striper. Duffy decided to give it a try and found that volunteering gave him a purpose. "I fell in love with it," says Duffy. He also found that volunteering gave him insight into the hospital scene, where physicians disappeared while nursing staff members cared for patients and did what needed to be done to ensure they got better.

He was at the hospital every day, and thoughts of taking the civil service examination and becoming a police officer dimmed, especially when he was offered a job as an orderly at St Francis Hospital, Blue Island, Ill, when he was a senior in high school. "I really enjoyed working in that setting," says Duffy, adding that the work at the hospital had a huge effect on him. His grades shot up, he was not hanging out on the streets anymore, and he began to think about going to college.

Duffy entered Loyola University in Chicago as a premed student with the intention of becoming a physician, but he was concerned about the applicability of a biology degree if he did not go on to medical school. In addition, he remembered what he had seen during his work at the hospital. "I kept thinking about how the nurses were really the ones who did the hands on with the patients, so I transferred into nursing," says Duffy. He was one of six men in a class of 250 nursing students.

Duffy also holds a degree that is somewhat unusual among nurses. He has a master's of jurisprudence in health care from Loyola University School of Law, Chicago. When it came time for him to get an advanced degree, Duffy says that most of his colleagues were getting a master's degree in business administration. "But, I've always tried to walk a different path." He decided on law because he was curious about the lack of knowledge that he seemed to have. He noted that people in his setting were always saying that they were going to get sued, and he wondered how they knew. He thought maybe he had missed something in nursing school that explained when a health care system was going to get sued. He wanted to know the ins and outs of how the legal system can affect the health care system.

"I loved law school," says Duffy. The program that he was in emphasized health care law rather than criminal law, and Duffy found himself in class with individuals from the health care field, as well as lawyers who specialized in malpractice law, which made for some interesting debates in the classroom. "Most health care professionals don't have a clue about how the legal system works, what the expectations are, where the risks are," says Duffy. "It was probably, besides my professional nursing training, the best two years of education I got because it really opened my eyes to the system and how it works."

CAREER CHOICES

During his last semester while he was getting his bachelors in nursing degree, Duffy got a job on the surgical floor at St Joseph Hospital, Chicago, as part of a transitional program. He also was the softball coach for the nurses' softball team, and when his teammates found out that he had taken a job at Children's Memorial Hospital, Chicago, they refused to let him leave.

After a year at St Joseph, he moved to the postanesthesia care unit and did recovery room nursing for two years. Then he took a job in the OR. "That's when I knew I found my niche in nursing," says Duffy. "I thought I did more nursing in the operating room in a shorter time frame than I did on the floor." He liked that he was part of a group that was so occupied with solving the problems of the patients they saw. Duffy says that when OR patients leave the hospital, they usually go home with their problems taken care of; he also admits he could never be a psychological nurse because those patients never seem to get cured. "It's very intense, challenging medical conditions (in the OR)," says Duffy. "You work with other people, and you fix these patients up."

His parents taught him that you give an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, and he encourages those who complain to look for opportunities for change. It is that philosophy that led him into management. He was tired of hearing people in the nursing lounge complain about how things were run. He wanted to do something to fix the problems. "I kept saying that if you weren't part of the solution, you were part of the problem," says Duffy. His supervisor encouraged him to apply for a head nurse position, and although he saw it as an opportunity to be an agent of change, he never actually expected to get the position. No one was more surprised than he when he was offered the job. Duffy then worked his way up to the director of surgical services position. He had been at St Joseph Hospital for 15 years when a call came from Evanston Northwestern Healthcare Corp, Evanston, Ill.