Using an Academic-Practice Partnership to Implement a Perioperative Nursing Elective in a Baccalaureate Nursing Program.

Many perioperative nurses are reaching retirement age and hospital leaders are experiencing difficulty with maintaining staffing levels. When baccalaureate nursing students seek employment after graduation, they may not consider perioperative nursing because of a lack of familiarity with the specialty. Faculty members at one college of nursing collaborated with hospital leaders in Oklahoma and developed a perioperative nursing elective course to address this gap. During the first three years of the partnership, 34 students completed the course. Nine students accepted perioperative nurse externships and nine graduates accepted perioperative nurse positions. All the students who completed the perioperative nursing course passed the NCLEX-RN examination on the first attempt. The academic-practice leaders continue to offer the course as a strategy to recruit perioperative nurses in Oklahoma. This article describes a process for developing a perioperative nursing elective course to prepare baccalaureate nursing students for employment after graduation.

The Effect of a Perioperative Nursing Elective on Nursing Career Paths.

Nurse educators play a role in addressing the growing perioperative nurse shortage in the United States by implementing strategies to entice new graduates to this specialty. The purpose of our study was to determine if an undergraduate perioperative nursing elective influenced the career choices of nurses four to nine years after they graduated from a baccalaureate nursing program in the midwestern United States. Using a descriptive study design, 23 of 50 nurses responded to a survey about positions they have held since graduating and the influence of a perioperative nursing elective on their career choices. Twenty-six percent of nurses in this sample went on to work in the perioperative specialty, and the majority indicated they continued to consider perioperative nursing as a career choice. Considering the potential long-term effects of this strategy, incorporating a perioperative nursing elective into nursing school curricula could be helpful to address the shortage of perioperative nurses.