08/19/2022

Member Spotlight: Diane McNaughton

Diane McNaughton joined ACHNE in 2001 after being introduced to the organization by Julia Cowell when Diane was a PhD student at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She was encouraged to submit her dissertation research to present at the AI and was accepted. While at the AI, she was impressed with all of the nursing leaders she met and was encouraged to become involved in the organization. She served as Chair of the Research Committee for several years and as Treasurer for two terms. Now she is a member of the Archives Committee and will be the Chair next year.

Diane received her BSN and MN from Louisiana State University, the Health Sciences Campus in New Orleans. She started her nursing career working in intensive care for both children and adults, including working as a flight nurse. She became interested in how to prevent the problems that brought people to the ICU—to prevent the suffering of the patients and their families. That led to her master's degree, after which she started teaching public health nursing at Our Lady of Holy Cross College (now Holy Cross University) in New Orleans, and fell in love with teaching. She moved to Chicago to pursue her PhD then became a faculty member at Rush University.

Diane is proud of her work with students, particularly seeing all they have accomplished in their years after school. She worked with DNP students and Chicago Public Schools to establish comprehensive sex education in the district, for which Rush received an AACN Academic-Practice Partnership Award. One of Diane’s former students, Linda Mendonca, is currently President of NASN and other students have won various awards.

Diane is passionate about public health nursing overall, but especially about working collaboratively with people to improve health. Her work during her master’s program focused on quality public health nursing interventions for people who are homeless, who, despite having numerous health concerns, are often more concerned about problem-solving and relationships than about their health. Her doctoral research focused on the qualities of public health nursing interventions that most benefited the maternal-child population. During this time, she worked as a Research Assistant with Julia Cowell resulting in two NIH-funded studies focused on mental health promotion for Mexican immigrant women and their children, one as Co-Investigator and one as Primary Investigator. During these studies, she learned about community partnerships and truly felt a connection with the mothers and children she worked with as part of that research.

Diane would like ACHNE members to know how unique ACHNE is as an organization. You find expert PHN researchers, educators, and their students. ACHNE is at the forefront of leading the profession, and people in ACHNE are interested in working together to support junior researchers and students. She encourages everyone to get involved in committee work to advance ACHNE’s mission. It’s important to have diverse points of view represented in the committees, so you can contribute a lot.