American nursing is shaped by several hundred organisations, and most confusion about them comes from treating them as one kind of thing. They are not. A body that can take a nurse's licence away, a body that lobbies on the nurse's behalf, a body that sells a credential, and a body that inspects a school are four different animals with different powers and different interests.
This section describes the major ones. The distinctions below are worth reading first, because they determine what any given organisation can actually do for or to a nurse.
Five kinds of organisation
Regulators. A state board of nursing is a government agency. It issues licences, investigates complaints and imposes discipline, and its duty runs to the public rather than to nurses. See nurse practice acts and boards of nursing. Boards are not members of a professional association; they belong to a coordinating body, the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, which produces the licensing examination and the shared licence database.
Professional associations. These are membership organisations that advocate, publish standards, run conferences and fund research. They have no authority over any nurse. The general one is the American Nurses Association; the rest are organised by specialty, role or population.
Unions. A union bargains a contract with an employer and can call a strike. Some state nurses associations act as both professional association and union, which is a source of endless confusion. The largest nursing union is National Nurses United. See nurse strikes and bargaining.
Certifying boards. These award specialty credentials to individuals. Certification is voluntary recognition of expertise beyond licensure and does not expand scope of practice. Many were spun out of professional associations to keep the examination independent of the membership body, which is why the association and its certifying board usually have different names. See nursing specialties.
Accreditors. These inspect and approve programmes rather than people: nursing schools, residency programmes, continuing education providers. Accreditation is what makes a qualification portable between states and acceptable to employers.
One organisation often occupies several of these categories at once. The American Nurses Association is a professional association whose subsidiary, the American Nurses Credentialing Center, is simultaneously a certifying board, an accreditor of continuing education, and the awarder of Magnet recognition to hospitals.
Regulation and licensure
- National Council of State Boards of Nursing, the organisation of the 59 nursing regulatory bodies, which produces the licensing examination, the national licence database and the interstate compact.
General professional bodies
- American Nurses Association, the general association for registered nurses, publisher of the code of ethics and the standards of practice.
- American Nurses Credentialing Center, its credentialing subsidiary, which certifies nurses and recognises hospitals.
- American Academy of Nursing, an honorific and policy body whose fellows use the letters FAAN.
- Sigma, the international honor society of nursing, founded in 1922.
Labour
- National Nurses United, the largest registered nurse union, formed in 2009.
Education and accreditation
- American Association of Colleges of Nursing, the association of university nursing schools, which sets the Essentials competencies and runs the collegiate accrediting commission.
- National League for Nursing, the oldest nursing organisation in the country and the body for nurse faculty across all programme types.
Advanced practice
- American Association of Nurse Practitioners, source of the full, reduced and restricted practice classification used in every discussion of nurse practitioner regulation.
- American Association of Nurse Anesthesiology, for certified registered nurse anesthetists, founded in 1931.
- American College of Nurse-Midwives, for certified nurse-midwives and certified midwives.
Specialty associations
- American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, the largest specialty organisation, behind the critical care credential and the healthy work environment standards.
- Emergency Nurses Association, which runs the trauma and paediatric emergency courses.
- AORN, perioperative nursing, publisher of the guidelines used in operating rooms.
- Oncology Nursing Society, cancer nursing and the hazardous drug handling standards.
- AWHONN, women's health, obstetric and neonatal nursing, publisher of the perinatal staffing standards.
- National Association of School Nurses, school nursing and the practice framework.
Organisations by community
- National Black Nurses Association, founded in 1971 out of the exclusion of Black nurses from the existing associations.
Similar national bodies exist for Hispanic nurses, Filipino American nurses, Asian American and Pacific Islander nurses, American Indian and Alaska Native nurses, and men in nursing, and they frequently act together on federal workforce policy.
How to read a claim from any of them
Three questions separate authority from opinion.
Does it license? Only a state board does.
Does it bargain? Only a union does, and only where nurses have voted for representation.
Does it earn money from what it is recommending? A certifying board recommending certification, an association recommending its own standards manual, and a school association reporting on the value of degrees are all making claims worth weighing on the merits.
None of that makes their material unreliable. Much of the best evidence on staffing, education and practice comes from exactly these bodies, and this wiki cites it throughout. It is the reason to read the source rather than the press release.
Related
- Nurse practice acts and boards of nursing
- Nursing specialties
- Scope of practice
- Magnet recognition
- Nurse strikes and bargaining
- Nursing blogs
Sources
- About NCSBN. National Council of State Boards of Nursing. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- About the American Nurses Association. American Nurses Association. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- About ANCC. American Nurses Credentialing Center. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- About National Nurses United. National Nurses United. Accessed September 9, 2026.