AACN Board
July 2018-June 2021
Anna Dermenchyan, MSN, RN, CCRN-K, serves a three-year term as a director on the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) board of directors from July 1, 2018, through June 30, 2021.
Dermenchyan is a director in the Department of Medicine Quality at UCLA Health, Los Angeles. In this role, she leads, facilitates and implements improvement initiatives and performs strategic planning, program development and execution, oversight of organizational priorities, policy improvements and staff personnel management. Dermenchyan started her nursing career in the Cardiothoracic ICU at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, where she cared for transplant and surgical patients from 2008-2013. As a clinical nurse, she was involved in the Magnet Advisory Council, Performance Improvement Committee, Unit Practice Council and The DAISY Awards selection committee.
Her passion for the profession led her to establish the first hospital-based AACN Chapter at UCLA in 2010, where she served as president from 2010-2012. Since 2012, she has been program chair for the annual Leadership Symposium. The chapter has earned three AACN Circle of Excellence chapter awards. Since 2008, she has also been a member of AACN’s San Fernando Valley Chapter, California.
An AACN ambassador since 2008, Dermenchyan served on the NTI Program Planning Committee (2012-2013) and AACN Nominating Committee (2013-2014 and 2019-2020). She has presented sessions on healthy work environments, leadership skills and competencies, networking and workplace violence at AACN’s National Teaching Institute. She also published a column in Critical Care Nurse on workplace violence involving nurses who face potentially violent situations. In 2018, she received an AACN Circle of Excellence award.
Dermenchyan’s professional interests include leadership, health policy, healthcare ethics, quality and patient safety, critical care, work environments and global health. In addition to AACN, her memberships include AcademyHealth, American Nurses Association, Association of California Nurse Leaders, Ethics of Caring, Sigma and the Society of Critical Care Medicine. She served as president of Sigma’s Gamma Tau at-Large Chapter (2016-2018), chair of Southern California’s Regional Odyssey Conference (2016, 2015) and a committee member on the International Digital Transformation and Engagement Task Force (2017-2018).
Dermenchyan earned a Master of Science in Nursing from UCLA School of Nursing, Los Angeles, where she is working on a PhD. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles, and a Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience from UCLA. Her long-term research goal is to investigate the relationship between self-management support programs and health outcomes in patients with heart failure.