Tonisha J. Melvin

Tonisha Melvin, DNP, APRN, CRRN, ANP-C, is a nurse practitioner with the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington, DC. At the DCVAMC, she serves as the Veterans Affairs Nursing Academy Program Faculty for the Primary Care Nurse Practitioner Residency program in partnership with the Catholic University of America. Dr. Melvin has participated on numerous committees for quality improvement and ethical and clinical compliance for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

In February of 2019 and 2020, she was named one of sixty-eight African American Leaders in Healthcare by Becker’s Hospital Review. Dr. Melvin is a contributing author of The Charge Nurse Leader Program Builder: A Competency-Based Approach for Developing Frontline Leaders, a comprehensive curriculum and roadmap for developing nurse leaders and ensuring charge nurses are trained, mentored, and supported in their roles.

Dr. Melvin is an active volunteer. In addition to conducting annual community health screenings, she is a vocal advocate for nursing issues, such as safe staffing and nurses’ work environments. She also began efforts to prevent adult and childhood obesity and promote nurse health and wellness. Dr. Melvin also cofounded the Melvin Family’s Meal Donation, which feeds families during the holiday season.

She is an active member in different professional organizations. Some roles she has held are auditor and reviewer for the Association of Rehabilitation Nurses, and Governance chair and Membership Outreach committee leader for Sigma Theta Tau International’s Georgia Pi Gamma chapter, and she is an active member of the Georgia Nurses Association and the American Nurses Association, where she serves as a current board member. In addition to her director role with ANA, Dr. Melvin sits on a number of ANA board committees, including the committee on honorary awards, the committee on appointments (current chair), the employee relations committee, and formerly, the committee on planning and budget. As chair of the Committee on Honorary Awards for ANA, Dr. Melvin also championed significant changes to ANA’s National Awards Program. In 2015, she served as vice president of the Concerned National Black Nurses Association.

Dr. Melvin earned her Doctor of Nursing Practice degree from Georgia Baptist College School of Nursing of Mercer University and was inducted into the Phi Kappa Phi multidisciplinary collegiate honor society in 2017. She is certified as an adult nurse practitioner (NP-C) by the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners and as a certified rehabilitation registered nurse by the Association of Rehabilitation Nurses. She is currently enrolled at Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing in the Post Master’s Psychiatric Mental Health program, and she has been accepted into the 2020 Yale School of Nursing Candidate program.