ENA26 Narrows Nurse Bullying Resolution; LA General Honored for Field Response

Editor’s note: The author attended ENA26 as a California delegate to the ENA General Assembly.

Emergency Nursing 2026, the Emergency Nurses Association’s annual conference, was held in Phoenix, Arizona. The General Assembly, ENA’s annual business meeting, convened September 27-28.

ENA advertised more than 100 educational sessions along with networking, professional development, keynote presentations, and its Experience Hall.

“Nursing can be isolating, then you come to an ENA event and suddenly you’re surrounded by a community of people who just get it. That’s the power of us,” ENA President Dustin Bass, DNP, MHA, RN, CEN, NEA-BC, told attendees.

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ENA describes General Assembly as its annual business meeting, where delegates from around the world debate and vote on proposals affecting both the association and emergency nursing.

The proposals covered an enormous range of subjects: ENA governance, international membership, cannabis ingestion, freestanding emergency departments, micromobility injuries, first-responder mental health, resuscitation education, neurodivergent patients, and workplace bullying.

Some passed with relatively little controversy. Others showed just how differently emergency nurses view the role their professional association should play.

The most contested proposal was GA26-06, originally titled “Addressing Nurse Bullying and Incivility.” It called on ENA to prioritize bullying and incivility within emergency care settings and explicitly recognized their potential consequences for nurse retention, patient safety, organizational effectiveness, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and suicide risk.

It went further.

The proposal called for educational resources and practical strategies, but it also asked ENA to advocate for policies, accreditation standards, legislation, and regulatory requirements supporting psychological safety, retaliation-free reporting mechanisms, and organizational accountability.

After the proposal was introduced, 13 delegates queued to speak, the largest response to a proposal at that point in the General Assembly. Delegates who opposed a larger role for ENA argued that resources already exist and that the association could rely on work being done elsewhere.

An Amendment Narrowed the Language

According to the ENA Day 1 Report, the proposed amendment to GA26-06, offered by delegate Renee Schoenbeck, made substantial changes.

Most notably, it replaced the broader terminology “nurse bullying and incivility” with “lateral violence.” “Lateral” or “horizontal” violence traditionally describes harmful behavior occurring among peers or colleagues at similar levels of an organization.

The amendment also struck portions of the original proposal explicitly discussing anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation and suicide risk. Language calling for psychological safety, retaliation-free reporting mechanisms and organizational accountability was also removed.

GA26-06 was adopted as amended.

Los Angeles General Medical Center’s Hospital Emergency Response Team (HERT) received an ENA Team Award. HERT essentially takes the trauma center into the field. When EMS encounters a critically injured or entrapped patient whose rescue may be prolonged or require advanced medical or surgical expertise, a team that includes an experienced emergency or trauma nurse, an emergency physician, and a trauma surgeon can deploy directly to the scene.

These are not everyday calls. LA General receives approximately four to five HERT activations each year and actually deploys about twice annually, according to Emerson Martell, BSN, RN, MICN, the HERT Program Manager. But when the team does deploy, the circumstances can be extreme. HERT can bring capabilities such as advanced airway management, sedation, blood products and, in extraordinarily rare circumstances, surgical intervention such as a field amputation when necessary for lifesaving extrication.

HERT nurses are experienced emergency or trauma nurses who also hold Mobile Intensive Care Nurse (MICN) certification through the Los Angeles County EMS Agency, allowing them to serve as a bridge between the hospital team and the EMS professionals already treating the patient in the field. They establish vascular access, administer medications and blood products under physician direction, manage specialized equipment, document care and help coordinate the people and clinical workflow needed to make the response function safely.

Because these deployments are so rare and high-risk, every activation becomes an opportunity to improve. HERT conducts multidisciplinary debriefs that examine the response from the initial 911 call through activation, field care, extrication and transport. Lessons from previous responses have led to changes in equipment, airway resources, blood products and training. The team’s philosophy is simple: “Respond. Debrief. Learn. Train. Improve.”

Martell described emergency nurses as people who routinely manage everything from pediatric and adult resuscitations to trauma, stroke, burns and ECMO without expecting recognition for it. “It is what we do!”

Two of the adopted proposals pointed toward ENA’s increasingly international membership:

• GA26-02 addressed ENA’s membership classifications and terminology based on scope of practice. The issue sounds bureaucratic until you consider ENA’s increasingly global reach. American nursing terminology does not necessarily translate cleanly to nursing systems elsewhere in the world. Not every country organizes nursing credentials around the American use of “registered nurse.” Delegates adopted the proposal.
• GA26-08 addressed affordability. Delegates heard discussion about the enormous differences in nurse income around the world and the difficulty nurses in lower-income countries can face paying U.S.-based membership rates. The proposal supporting more inclusive pricing for international members and learners was adopted.

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The 2026 General Assembly considered the following additional proposals. Outcomes below reflect delegate reporting from the floor and the Resolutions Committee’s Day 1 recommendations where final vote tallies were not independently verified by Nurse.org.

• GA26-01, separating ENA’s Leadership Development and Elections Committee: voted down.
• GA26-03, aligning ENA standards with the rehabilitative ethos of nursing regulation: adopted via consent agenda.
• GA26-04, establishing a Leadership Development Committee: adopted.
• GA26-05, care expectations for accidental cannabis ingestion: adopted as amended.
• GA26-07, establishing a freestanding emergency department committee: recommended for adoption as amended, with the body broadened to a “committee, task force, or special interest group.”
• GA26-09, micromobility-related injuries: adopted.
• GA26-10, supporting first responders in mental-health crises: recommended for adoption.
• GA26-11, resuscitation education for first-time learners in the emergency department: no clear consensus; presented for floor consideration.
• GA26-12, AEDs at sporting events: recommended for adoption.
• GA26-13, education on caring for neurodivergent patients in the emergency department: recommended for adoption via consent agenda.

She’s Birdie, which makes personal safety alarms, including devices that can be carried when walking alone, appeared to be one of the popular booths. There is something sobering about seeing personal safety products resonate at a conference full of emergency nurses.

Vistelar’s focus included workplace-violence prevention and training that organizations can implement with their employees. Given the amount of violence healthcare workers encounter, seeing vendors focused not merely on documenting the problem but on prevention and training was notable.

Another exhibit focused on how nurses are represented, or underrepresented, in television and entertainment. Shows such as Grey’s Anatomy and The Pitt were part of the discussion, particularly the tendency of medical dramas to depict physicians performing work that nurses frequently perform in actual clinical settings.

For millions of Americans, television may be one of their most consistent exposures to healthcare professions. Who gets portrayed as making decisions, performing procedures, recognizing deterioration, educating patients and saving lives influences how the public understands healthcare, and nurses deserve to be accurately represented in that story.

Author’s note: I have not watched either show, but I found the exhibit’s larger point about how nurses are depicted on screen worth sharing.

Members of the San Francisco ENA chapter also competed in SIM Wars, where teams assess, communicate, prioritize and respond to evolving clinical scenarios in front of an audience.

The amendment to GA26-06 did more than swap one phrase for another. “Lateral” or “horizontal” violence describes harmful behavior among peers or colleagues at similar levels of an organization. But workplace mistreatment in healthcare does not always come from peers.

What happens when the person engaging in the behavior is a manager, a supervisor, a charge nurse, or a preceptor with power over a new graduate? What about other members of the healthcare team?

Survey data cited by Becker’s Hospital Review illustrates why terminology matters: nurses reported harassment or bullying not only from fellow nurses, but also from managers or administrators and physicians. By narrowing the terminology, the adopted resolution narrows the people whose experiences fit its definition of the problem.

The data gap is its own problem. A statistic frequently cited in discussions of nurse bullying says 60% of new nurses left their first job within six months because of coworker behavior. That statistic, reported by Becker’s Hospital Review in 2016, is now a decade old, and originated from an anti-bullying educational resource rather than contemporary national workforce surveillance. Nurses still rely heavily on small studies, individual surveys, anecdotes and social-media discussions to understand which environments are struggling and why.

What ENA does next on bullying is worth watching. The adopted resolution is a step. Whether it leads to the kind of data, accountability mechanisms and policy work the original proposal called for is the question that will determine what it changes at the bedside.

🤔 What should a professional nursing organization do about bullying beyond issuing statements? Share your thoughts in the comments below.