President
Jean Seaver, MSN, RN
Associate Vice President, Learning & Development, Broward Health
Jean Seaver, Associate Vice President Learning & Development at Broward Health, is the new President of the Nursing Consortium of Florida. As President-Elect during the midst of the COVID crisis, Jean convened a committee of executive nurse leaders at member hospitals, schools of nursing, and nurse staffing agencies to assess what the pandemic had done to nursing and revealed about nursing in Florida. No other nursing organization is known to have engaged in such an initiative during the height of the pandemic other than the Nursing Consortium of Florida. The initiative found seven factors unique to hospital nursing in South Florida that caused the pandemic experience to be much more challenging, proposed specific recommended initiatives for addressing each, and identified ways that foundation executives, elected officials, and other leaders interested in addressing the current nursing shortage can help. Seaver was born in Burlington, Vermont and grew up outside of Boston. She says, “I knew I wanted to become a nurse when I was three years old when I had my tonsils removed.” That early instinct was realized when she graduated from Salem State College, Massachusetts with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Nursing. Seaver put herself through school, working all sorts of service jobs. She earned a Master of Science in Nursing Administration from Florida Atlantic University. She additionally pursued a doctorate degree in Educational Leadership. Seaver also holds a Certificate of Training and Development from Vanderbilt University.
Past President
Maria A. Suarez, DNP, MSN, APRN, ACNP-BC
Assistant Vice President, Nursing Administration, Miami Cancer Institute
Dr. Maria A. Suarez. Assistant Vice President, Nursing Operations at Baptist Health South Florida’s Miami Cancer Institute, is the Past President of the Nursing Consortium of Florida. During Maria’s tenure as president, the Nursing Consortium of Florida significantly grew its membership to more than seventy organizations adding hospitals and schools of nursing in the Treasure Coast counties and in Lee County. Maria’s insistence that nursing’s voice needed to be heard during the pandemic, resulted in the Consortium’s joining the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce as a Non-Profit Trustee Member, the creation of an advocacy committee, enhanced interaction with regional workforce boards, collaboration with member-led grass roots initiatives such as the statewide Nursing Advisory Council formed by Keiser University to secure greater support for nursing from state government, and enhanced collaboration with the Nurses on Boards Coalition to facilitate service by executive nurse leaders on foundation and community organization boards. Maria also obtained Board approval for a change of the prior Nursing Consortium of South Florida name in order to signal to nurse employers beyond the tri-county area that their interest in Consortium membership was welcomed. She has been an active participant on Nursing Consortium committees since 2007, supporting the growth of Day in the Life of a Nurse, the Centralized Clinical Placement System (CCPS), and other Nursing Consortium initiatives. She was first inspired to become a nurse as a student at Miami Beach Senior High School and she has been a nurse for more than 30 years.
President-elect
Jason Dunne, DNP, MN, RN, CNE
Vice President, Operations, Arizona College of Nursing
Dr. W Jason Dunne, Vice President, Operations Arizona College of Nursing, is the new President-elect of the Nursing Consortium of Florida. During the past two years, Jason served as Board Secretary, and proved himself to be an extraordinarily creative and resourceful director. As chair of the Consortium’s Youth Engagement Committee, Jason faced a pandemic forced end to the twenty year run of the Nursing Consortium of Florida’s acclaimed Day in the Life of a Nurse™ program which had annually welcomed as many as 1,000 public high school students from Miami Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties to host hospitals and schools of nursing. Instead Jason solicited video contributions from member organizations, and led the creation of a two-week long virtual experience, consisting of interactive and curated video content for teachers to share with students learning remotely rather than in classroom settings. The virtual Day in the Life of a Nurse™ experience reached more than 5,000 middle and high school students. Once students returned to the classroom changes were made to the content to facilitate optimized in-classroom experiences to reach greater numbers of students than could be accommodated for in-person experiences at member hospitals and schools of nursing. a strong believer in community service and has served on a variety of voluntary board and advisory positions including the National League for Nursing Awards Committee, Nurses on Boards Coalition State and National Integrated Strategies Work Group, and others. He has been a nurse for 23 years.
Board Secretary
Nancy Gonzalez, MSN, APRN-BC, PPCNP-BC
Associate Dean, Nursing, Broward College
Nancy Gonzalez, Associate Dean, Nursing, Broward College, is the new Secretary of the Nursing Consortium of Florida. During her initial two-year term on the board, Nancy was an active member of the Consortium’s Conference Planning, Youth Initiative, and Recruitment and Retention Committees. In 2023, she will co-chair the Conference Planning Committee in addition to serving as Board Secretary. Among her achievements Gonzalez marketed a new part-time option for ASN program to area hospitals, resulting in a 100% increase over projected beginning enrollment. She developed and implemented an online student document tracking system that streamlined the clinical management of students in the nursing clinical rotations; planned, coordinated and developed new and revised nursing program policies and procedures to increase retention, lower attrition, and improve processes in clinical coordination. She increased number of part-time and full-time personnel and facilitated their training to increase the faculty flexibility across all campuses of the nursing program and to ensure maximum utilization of clinical resources. Gonzalez holds a Doctor of Nursing Practice, University of North Florida; Master of Science in Nursing and a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, from Florida International University; Associate of Science in Nursing, Miami-Dade Community College; Diploma from Jackson Memorial Hospital School of Nursing, and a Certificate in Forensic Nursing, Kaplan University. She has been a nurse in South Florida for 40 years and a board-certified pediatric nurse practitioner for 27 years.
Treasurer
Joanne Moselle, EdD, MSN, RN
Nova Southeastern University
Dr. Joanne Masella, Assistant Dean for Community Engagement and Integration at Nova Southeastern University Ron and Kathy Assaf College of Nursing, is the new Treasurer of the Nursing Consortium of Florida. Joanne has served multiple two-year terms on the Consortium Board and served as chair of the Youth Initiatives committee for a number of years; helping to significantly increase participation in Day in the Life of a Nurse™; particularly in Palm Beach County. Joanne has also been a very active member of the Consortium’s Conference Planning Committee for a number of years. In 2023, she will co-chair the Community Engagement Committee, which develops opportunities for nurse leaders to serve on foundation and community organization boards, in addition to serving as Treasurer. Dr. Masella was born in Philadelphia and has been a nurse for 46 years. She started her career as a clinician prior to moving on to teaching and developing nursing educational programs. As a teacher she tells students that nursing is both an art and a science. She stresses the value of compassion and love and says patients remember the little things you do, more than your technical skills. Her car has a bumper sticker that reads “Do Small Things with Great Love” (Mother Teresa). She sees the role of the Nursing Consortium “as essential to marketing the nursing profession, especially to young people to gain the next generation of the profession.”
