151 - Introducing Senior Nursing Students to PeriOperative Nursing

Description: Clinical Improvement/Innovation Poster

Description of Team: This enhanced clinical immersion was initiated by a team that included the clinical partner and their periop educator along with two faculty from the university, one of which has extensive periop experience and earned the CNOR(e) credential and remains active in AORN. Other team members include carefully selected, experienced, clinical preceptors.

Preparation and Planning: The nursing shortage in the US is well documented. It is especially challenging to staff operating rooms. Owing to this challenge is the fact that many traditional nursing programs fail to include periop nursing in the curriculum and their students lack substantive exposure to the perioperative clinical setting. In response to this shortage and after a request by a strategic clinical partner our traditional BSN nursing program tailored a last semester clinical experience to highlight perioperative nursing as a clinical specialty.

Assessment: Students' complete satisfaction surveys at the completion of the course and curriculum is revised based upon suggestions from the strategic clinical partner. Feedback from the clinical partner helps inform the timeframe for orientation after hire.

Implementation: The immersion clinical was developed utilizing materials provided by AORN, Colleges of Nursing Tool Kit. Faculty created a periop resource room for the students and provided them with the latest edition of Alexander's Care of the Patient in Surgery, AORN's Guidelines for Perioperative Practice, Print copies of the AORN Journal and OR Today. Students were prepared for the clinical setting by completing a day-long immersion in a simulated OR learning basic skills such as safe transfer and movement of periop patients, basic mechanics of the OR table, how to complete a surgical hand scrub and how to gown and glove themselves. They also were taught how to "tie in" team members. The two involved faculty members also gifted AORN membership to all students chosen for the enhanced perioperative immersion clinical and hosted them at local AORN Chapter meetings.

Outcome: To date six students have completed the enhanced perioperative clinical immersion and two have been hired by the strategic clinical partner with the goal of a decreased time in orientation.

Implications for perioperative nursing: The goal of the enhanced perioperative clinical is to expose students to perioperative nursing as a clinical specialty, grow interest in perioperative nursing and help to alleviate the critical shortage of perioperative nurses within one clinical agency.