Judi Lyons

At 15, Judi Lyons volunteered as a candy striper at the local hospital in Ellensburg and became inspired to be a nurse. After nursing school, she worked at that hospital for 45 years, seeing the radical changes in nursing and hospital leadership. She is known as a “nurse’s nurse” — competent, engaged, and experienced.

For her, nursing was a natural fit.  Her father was disabled her entire life with rheumatoid arthritis. He had a hospital bed in the front room and her mother would give him injections. When he walked, he used crutches. But he never let his illness prevent him from being the sole income earner for his wife and seven kids.

His spirit of overcoming adversity was a big lesson for Lyons. She was on the bargaining team for negotiations that started in November of 2010 and continued for more than two brutal years. That team won the Cabinet on Economic & General Welfare Adversity Award at the WSNA Leadership Conference in 2013.

Judi also served in WSNA district and local unit leadership positions for 36 continuous years as well as a frequent representative to the American Nurses Association House of Delegates and Membership Assembly. As president of WSNA from 1993 to 1997, Lyons oversaw a time of major challenges to WSNA’s collective bargaining program.

She also served in many other leadership positions — the WSNA Board of Directors, including as vice president; on the WSNA Cabinet on Economic & General Welfare; the Washington State Nurses Foundation; president of the Kittitas District Nurses Association, and in several officer positions in her local unit and negotiating teams.

Lyons has been actively involved in her specialty area of practice, perioperative nursing. For more than 25 years, she has been a member of the Washington State Council of Perioperative Nurses and has been integral to the annual WSCPN Mini-Congress, an annual nursing education program for perioperative nurses. Most recently Lyons served as president-elect and president of the WSCPN.

Many of us cannot remember a time when we did not have Judi’s steady, experienced hand to help guide us.