General Sessions
Thursday, April 22
8:30 - 10 a.m.
Opening Session: Cultivating Compassion through Abundance Mindset, Playfulness, and Creativity
 Tim Cunningham, DrPH, MSN, RN, FAAN
This interactive keynote will center on themes of compassion while encouraging the audience to find new ways to address it. We’ll play together, challenge one-another with the art of storytelling, and discover how we can use an a abundant mindset to face off with the negativity and all-too-present scarcity mindset we face in healthcare.
About Speaker:
Tim Cunningham is an internationally recognized keynote speaker and leader in healthcare well-being. Former Co–Chief Well-Being Officer at Emory Healthcare, he built systemwide strategies to support 35,000 professionals. Now Vice President at the Professional Nursing Validation Company, he advances interprofessional well-being. An actor and longtime board member of Clowns Without Borders, Tim brings a unique blend of compassion, creativity, and clinical insight to elevate healthcare and the human experience.
Saturday, April 24
9:15 - 10:30 a.m.
Closing Session: Health, Hope, and Humor: Reclaiming the Joy in Pediatric Nursing
 Karyn Buxman, RN, MSN
You went into nursing to make a difference. But somewhere between staffing shortages, moral injury, unmet expectations, and the emotional weight of caring for children and families, joy can get buried.
In this uplifting and practical keynote, Karyn Buxman, RN, MSN, CSP, CPAE, helps pediatric nurses find their way back to the heart of their work. Drawing from neuroscience, therapeutic humor, nursing experience, and her developing theory of humor in nursing, Karyn shows how intentional humor can help nurses manage stress, shift perspective, strengthen connection, and renew a sense of purpose.
This is not a pep talk, and no one has to become “the funny one.” Instead, attendees will learn evidence-informed ways to use humor safely and appropriately, without crossing a line, pretending everything is fine, or adding one more impossible thing to the to-do list.
Participants will laugh, reflect, and leave with simple tools to help them recapture joy, protect their well-being, and bring more health, hope, and humor back to pediatric nursing.
About Speaker:
Karyn Buxman is an RN, MSN, TEDx speaker, bestselling author, neurohumorist, and one of only 67 women in the world inducted into the National Speakers Association’s Hall of Fame. She is also the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor.
Karyn has spent her career studying the intersection of humor, the brain, resilience, healing, and connection. She is the author of nine books, including What’s So Funny About Nursing?, and her latest work includes an emerging nursing theory on humor as a safe, ethical, evidence-informed nursing competency.
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