ECU faculty member joins leadership of National Nursing League
Dr. Mark Hand has been elected to the Board of Governors for the National League of Nursing. (Contributed photo)
ECU faculty member Dr. Mark Hand has been elected to serve as a member of the National League for Nursing (NLN) Board of Governors for a three-year term beginning this year and lasting through 2022.
The organization, formerly founded in 1893 as the American Society of Superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses, became the very first nursing organization in the United States. The NLN caters to nurse educators by providing professional development, teaching resources, grants and initiatives on public policy to 40,000 individual and 1,200 institutional members. The members of the NLN have backgrounds in various levels of higher education.
“They have four core values, caring, integrity, diversity and excellence and I think, hopefully, through my three years in this position that I will be able to help continue that mission of what the National League stands for,” Hand said.
These core values support the NLN’s mission to advance the health of the nation and the global community. “I feel pretty strongly about the core values that the NLN has and I really feel that will all my experience that I can hopefully, through that Board of Governors, be able to relate and then share my knowledge of expertise in areas that I know of which goes along with their core values,” Hand said.
The NLN Nominations Committee assesses all suggestions brought from the individual and agency members along with constituent chapters, and develops a list of nominees for their annual election. The committee seeks candidates who have attributes and experience that include but are not limited to involvement in national or international policy conversations on nursing, advanced education and health; insightful on society’s vast array of cultures and NLN constituent league experience.
Hand has been involved with the NLN since 2000 and led the North Carolina chapter as its president from 2009 until 2014. Hand says this position gave him many opportunities that he wouldn’t have had by solely being a member.
“I was able to work with a group of individuals who had been in nursing education for some time and had been through the process of nursing education where I was still kind of new,” he said.
After beginning his career in mental health and spending nearly a decade working in day treatment centers and daycare centers for the mentally ill, Hand became interested in working with head injury patients who wanted to get back into the working field. His perpetual interest to learn combined with a conversation during lunch with an operating room nurse started his career in nursing.
“I got into a seven-week course for nursing assistants and the second day that I walked out of there I knew that nursing was going to be a really good thing for me,” Hand said. He completed his Associate’s Degree in Nursing, followed by a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in the field, which was inspired by interacting with students in the hospital.
Hand describes his position as a nursing instructor being the sole position that “got him into nursing education.” Hand taught at a college in New Hampshire, Durham Technical Community College and at East Carolina University. “I went back to Durham Tech and was their assistant director, then I came back here as the Chair and I just recently stepped down so that I could get back into teaching because that’s really what my passion is,” he said. Hand is impassioned about getting back to his roots in doing research and scholarship.
-by Janiya Winchester, University Communications