Meet Kyle Madigan, BCEN’s New Board Chair
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Advanced Response Team (DHART) director and transport industry expert, Kyle Madigan, MSN, RN, CEN, CFRN, CTRN, CCRN, CMTE, began a two-year term as BCEN’s board chairperson last month. Get to know Kyle and hear what the quintuple-board certified former chief flight nurse has to say about BCEN and emergency nursing specialty certification.
What are you most proud of?
I’m most proud of the science that goes into BCEN and the fact that we take certification very, very seriously. Everything that BCEN has done, starting with all of our examinations, is science- and evidence-based and thoughtfully reflects current practice. This is so important in validating the products that we have. Also, the amount of research that BCEN has embarked on over the last four to five years is astounding. Those BCEN-initiated research projects, most of which were firsts for our specialty and which have been documented in BCEN’s white papers and BCEN-authored journal articles, are significant contributions to demonstrating the importance of board certification and describing workforce issues.
I’m equally proud of the work we’ve done to support the customer experience. This starts with listening and takes shape in the many new and enhanced tools and resources we offer today, always with a focus on making sure navigating the certification process and working with our customer experience specialists is as easy, helpful and seamless as possible. The BCEN community we are all building together is growing by leaps and bounds. It’s exciting to see emergency, trauma and transport nurses across the country and around the world connecting, engaging and sharing with us and each other.
How did you get your start in emergency nursing?
When I was in junior college, which feels like a million years ago, I was an athletic training major and was asked to become an EMT because we’d travel with various athletic teams to sporting events and they wanted us to have some basic level of emergency care experience. Part of the EMT curriculum was to spend time working in the ED and ride on an ambulance. My shifts in the ED were quite interesting to me, and I saw medicine in a very different light.
After I completed the EMT class and my coursework, I ended up getting a job in that ED as an EMT and one of my roles was to push the stretcher up to the helipad and meet incoming helicopters. The first time I saw one of those helicopters land and the nurse get out with the patient, I said, “That’s the job for me.”
My first job as a flight nurse was in the mid-1990s with the University of Colorado. Then, if we fast forward to 2004, I came to Dartmouth as a flight nurse, then climbed the ladder to chief flight nurse, and about six years ago I became the DHART director.
In 2020, BCEN is marking 40 years of emergency nursing certification. What’s special for you about this year?
Early on in my career I learned about certification and set a goal for myself to strive to achieve it. I achieved my CEN certification after working in an ED for two years. I believe board certification demonstrates a commitment to three things: (1) to be the best you can be, (2) to provide the best care possible to your patients, and (3) to the profession.
As we all learned after nursing school, your education doesn’t stop at graduation. Setting your sights on a new goal such as certification encourages you to further develop your knowledge and skills which in turn makes you a better nurse. No matter how many years we’ve been a nurse, we can always learn more. Nursing and medicine are constantly growing and evolving, so we owe it to ourselves and our patients to be the best we can be. BCEN nurses are the best and make the commitment to be the best they can be every day.
That’s why everyone at BCEN is so excited for all of the great happenings and news we will share this year, made all the more meaningful with 2020 being the Year of the Nurse and Midwife. BCEN is all about nursing excellence. Getting to celebrate the excellence of all of our emergency, trauma and transport nurses is what this year is all about.
Read the BCEN 2020 Board Election announcement and connect with Kyle on LinkedIn.
