HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

I am excited to announce the results of our Executive Board elections and express my gratitude to the dedicated team members who worked hard to obtain our Charter Chapter status in 2021.

Here's a toast to the year gone by!

The winners of the Presidential and Treasurer elections are Lesli Miller and Ryan Murphy respectively.

I am confident that their leadership will provide the much-needed support, educational resources and training for our hospice and palliative care professionals. I’ve attached our Executive team bios below. Please join me in congratulating and welcoming Lesli and Ryan to their newly elected positions.

Thank you again for supporting one another during another year of this COVID pandemic. Through your tenacity, determination, and compassion, we overcame another difficult and challenging year! As palliative and hospice practitioners working daily with the seriously ill, we acknowledge and comprehend how the multi-level losses of patients and community affect the way we practice and live today. We value and appreciate the suffering some of our colleagues experienced --compassion fatigue, burnout, and moral distress and recognize and admire how we’ve learned to protect and soothe ourselves and one another.

This past year taught us alot of lessons-- harsh and soft-- but most importantly, we stuck together through thick and thin. We learned that as a Chapter we can find support and reprieve from the intense stress of caring for others.

As a group we acknowledge that we providers and our communities approach serious illness and death with many diverse values, beliefs, opinions, and ideas on how we view and face end of life. We embrace this diversity. We are dedicated to building a future that champions racial equity, values different backgrounds, celebrates unique perspectives, and provides a sense of belonging.

We are grateful for one another and look forward to forming more friendships and connections. Cheers to what the coming year brings us!

Congratulations New Jersey on becoming a Chartered chapter this year!

If you have not joined our local chapter, please do! We need your ideas, voices and participation to make our Chapter strong to support one another through thoughtful, inspiring and innovative programming and to advocate for our communities healthcare needs.

Click here to join our NJ Chapter!

 

Lesli Miller  

 Lesli Miller MSN, APN, BCEN, ACHPN

PRESIDENT, 2 YEAR TERM

Message of Interest

Running for President of the NNJHPNA Chapter is a professional goal that will afford me the opportunity to promote the advancement of Palliative Care and Hospice practices within our organization and beyond. By participating in and developing educational events and engaging our members to become active in our Chapter, I will uphold our mission statement: to build an influential network of hospice and palliative care nurses and professionals in New Jersey to share tools, resources, and education focused on the provision of expert care of the seriously ill.

Lesli received her associate's degree from Bergen Community College, BSN from College of Saint Elizabeth, and MSN from Walden University. She got her start in nursing as an emergency room nurse for ten years before advancing her career to a Clinical Nurse Educator and then a Palliative Care APN. As a Clinical Nurse Educator, she taught The End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC) program to colleagues in the acute care setting. The ELNEC project is a national and international education initiative to improve palliative care.

Currently she is employed by Hackensack Meridian Health -- Raritan Bay Medical Center as a Palliative Care Advanced Practice Nurse where she evaluates and cares for patients with serious illnesses. In addition, she participates in nursing and medical resident education and serves as a clinical preceptor for nurse practitioner students and nurse practitioner residents seeking palliative care experiences. She has worked as a palliative care APN for 6 years.

One of her proudest life experiences was when she volunteered to participate in a medical mission to the Dominican Republic during her BSN program.

Lesli served as the secretary of the Northern New Jersey Provisional Chapter of HPNA’s steering committee since October of 2019 and was extensively involved and committed to the application for charter status this past year. She was recently re-elected as the Secretary of the Northern NJ HPNA Chapter.

In her free time, she is a cat mom to three beautiful Maine Coon mixed fur babies. She loves to cook and spend time with her friends and family to share fun and laughter while being grateful for her wonderful life!

 

Ryan Murphy  

Ryan Murphy, RN, MSN, NP- C, ACHPN

TREASURER, 2 YEAR TERM

Message of Interest:

Hello all and thank you for your consideration as I reapply for the NNJ Treasurer position. It has been a privilege working alongside the executive board and planning committee for the last couple of years to get this chapter up and running. It would be an honor to continue in this role as our newly developed chapter continues to grow.  

Ryan is currently an Advanced Practice Nurse with the Division of Palliative and Geriatric Medicine and St. Joseph’s Health in Paterson, NJ. In this role, he provides both inpatient consultation and outpatient care for pain management, advanced care planning, and support. Ryan has a special interest in working with patients who have concurrent psychiatric diagnoses, substance use disorder, and/or chronic serious illness. 

After receiving his Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from Monmouth University (’14), he decided to enter healthcare as a nurse and was educated through Yale School of Nursing where he became both a RN and an Advanced Practice Nurse (17’). His interest in this field was solidified during his time with the Hospice and Palliative Care Fellowship for Nurse Practitioners at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (’18).

While Ryan loves his career, his favorite title is Dad. Ryan and his wife enjoy trying to keep up with their 1-year-old son as he learns to walk, run, and climb all over the house. 

meliza  

Meliza Garrido, DNP, RN, NP-C, ANP-BC, FNP-BC, ACHPN

President-Elect & Secretary

 Meliza served in the capacity of President elect and was appointed interim Secretary of the Executive Board, replacing Lesli Miller until 12/22

Meliza graduated from William Paterson University with both her MSN and DNP degrees. She has twenty-five years of nursing experience with eleven years as an Advanced Nurse Practitioner.

She currently works at The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood New Jersey as a Palliative Care Advanced Nurse Practitioner. Aside from her passion of caring for patients with serious, chronic illnesses, she loves to conduct and participate in research. She is an active member of the hospital’s Research Committee for over fifteen years.  She is an Adjunct Professor of Nursing at William Paterson University for over six years. Meliza has been an invaluable member of the Northern New Jersey Chapter of HPNA as the President-Elect.

She enjoys family time and loves to travel.  

tacy  

Tacy Silverberg-Urian, RN, BSN, CHPN

Immediate Past President

 Tacy has dedicated over forty years of her career to the health care arena. Her experience includes as an RN direct-care provider, clinical manager, nurse leader, hospice and home health care administrator, and strategist. She is a baby boomer who wants to “right” death with compassion and education. Now as a health care leader in the Death Wellness movement she supports death literacy and refuses to have a terrible death. Tacy believes that talking can create peaceful deaths in the end.

As founder of Advance Choices (https://advancechoices.org/) an organization that provides community education and advocacy for hospice and palliative care programs, she conducts workshops and lectures for the community and universities. Currently she is a member of the Steering Committee of Essex County’s Conversations of Your Life (COYL) a program of the NJ Healthcare Quality Institutes’ Mayor Wellness Campaign. As a member of NHPCO’s (National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization) Advocacy Network, she visits the Hill to advocate and affect public policy to improve end of life care. She is passionate about Transcultural Nursing and believes that receiving culturally congruent care is a “basic human right”. In her book, The Last Mile of the Way, she concludes that training and matching culturally diverse front-line staff with the communities served is essential.

She enjoys yoga and meditation, hiking, traveling, kayaking, family time, and dance performances.