Alberta Association of Nurses’ new CEO looks to the future of nursing
Annjanette Ridsdale-Weddell’s association with the nursing profession started early. When the Indigenous nurse was about three years old, she recalls, she ate some rat poison on her family’s ranch in Saskatchewan! She recalls the nurse who attended to her in a white uniform with black stripes on her nursing cap. “I still remember her calm presence. They had to keep me overnight and she was on the evening shift. She just babied me.” Evidently, Ridsdale-Weddell’s positive impression of the nursing profession stuck with her.
Today, Ridsdale-Weddell – “call me Annj!’ – is CEO of the Alberta Association of Nurses, the advocacy organization for all regulated nurses created in 2022 when the College and Association of Registered Nurses of Alberta was restructured to become the College of Registered Nurses of Alberta.
The goal of the new association is to represent the interests of Registered Nurses, Registered Psychiatric Nurses, Licensed Practical Nurses, Nurse Practitioners, nursing students and retired nurses in the province. This presents some challenges, Ridsdale-Weddell explained, in part because membership is voluntary. Hired as AAN’s second CEO at the start of this year, she says encouraging and assisting professional development for nurses is among her principal goals for the organization. “If I can help nurses at the bedside of any designation in any way, that’s going to be my goal.”
Ridsdale-Weddell seems well qualified for that role. She graduated with a Registered Nursing diploma from the Saskatchewan Institute of Arts Science and Technology in 1988, completed a BScN at the University of Alberta in 2012, an MBA from the Australian Institute of Business in 2018, and is now in the process of wrapping up a Doctor of Nursing degree at the University of Calgary. Over the years since 1988, mostly spent in Alberta, Ridsdale-Weddell has filled such roles as an educator for Alberta Health Services, various director positions for the government of Alberta, Registered Nurse employed by the NHL, and a program manager at Covenant Health. She continues in a front-line nursing role and is a member of UNA. “I’m representing the voice of nurses, and I really need to understand their work life and what they’re faced with,” she says.
While different regulated nursing professions are often represented by different bargaining agents, Ridsdale-Weddell notes, “it’s important that we stand together” in a profession that’s constantly facing change, not always for the better. “What worries me is that the working environment is so unhealthy right now.”
The good news, she says, is that “nurses know what we need to do.” Thus, part of her job is to advocate to government to listen to what nurses have to say. “Nurses can tell us how to fix this. So I’m encouraged by that. But the thing that has kept me awake at night is the state of the working environment that nurses are trying to work in.”
Her advice for new nurses? “If you’re not a union member, join the union. If you’re not an association member, join the association. We’re the ones who are making sure that the voice of nurses is being heard. If you have a nurse at the decision table, you have the voice of patients and families there too.”
“Nurses are the heartbeat of health care,” Ridsdale-Weddell concludes. “Have some pride in that! It’s an incredibly difficult but meaningful job.”
