2024 outstanding Recent Alumna Award Winner
Rhonda Finnie, DNP, APRN, AGACNP-BC, ANVP-BC, ASC-BC, is a nurse practitioner with Baptist Health Neurosurgery Arkansas in Little Rock. She earned a BA in Economics from Lyon College in 1992 after which she had plans to work for the Federal Reserve chairman (only he didn’t know that). She changed course after getting married and having children and pursued nursing. She obtained her BSN in 2002 at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas and obtained her doctorate in 2013 from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis.
She is boarded as an Adult-Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner, Advanced NeuroVascular Practitioner and Advanced Stroke Coordinator. In addition to her clinical role, she created the first Advanced Practice Council and is currently the Advanced Practice Coordinator at the Baptist Health Little Rock campus. She is the current Chair of the Board of Directors of the largest nonprofit hospice agency in Arkansas, Arkansas Hospice, and serves on the Neurocritical Care Society’s APP Leadership team. She has been an active member of the Association of NeuroVascular Clinicians (ANVC), an organization of interdisciplinary stroke professionals dedicated to improving quality and access to acute stroke care, and is very proud to have been elected as the ANVC President Elect 2023-2024.
She has received numerous awards throughout her career, including the 2018 Harding University Carr College of Nursing Alum of the Year and the 2022 AANP State Excellence Award.
After reading Joe Tye’s book, The Florence Prescription: From Accountability to Ownership – A Manifesto for a Positive Healthcare Culture, she finally found a motto to cling to – “Proceed until Apprehended.” She is currently enrolled in an MBA program with a concentration in Healthcare at Arkansas State University because she believes that we can’t become what we need to be by remaining what we are.
She has been married to the love of her life, Chris, for 35 years and has 2 grown daughters and a new grandson, Henry, who has captured the hearts of the entire family.
