By Melissa Wirkus, associate editor
Hospitals around the country are coming up with innovative programs, ideas and agendas to combat the nursing shortage currently afflicting the United States health care system.
Without a sufficient number of nurses joining the workforce, many hospitals are now having a difficult time finding qualified RNs for certain specialties—especially in the operating room.
A group of interns from the periOperative internship program at Southwest Washington Medical Center in Vancouver, Washington, eagerly wait for their course to begin.
Southwest Washington Medical Center in Vancouver, Washington, is all too familiar with this problem, so they decided to take matters into their own hands.
After realizing they had the resources and potential candidates right under their noses, the staff at Southwest took the necessary steps to begin building an in-house OR internship and training program.
“It was obvious to us that there was a need to set up a training program for either new nurses or experienced nurses to become OR nurses,” said Wendy Raynor, RN, BSN, team manager for the perioperative intern program at Southwest.
Interns from the OR training program get some hands-on experience as they practice in a skills lab.
The majority of the content for the program comes from the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN), the professional association for operating room nurses that also provides educational resources, standards of practice and opportunities for peer networking.
“We looked to the AORN for content and lecture models,” Raynor said. “We are moving to an online format this year. The content involves elements of the adult learning theory combined with clinical practice, lectures and full and inclusive lab sessions and workshops.”
The perioperative internship program runs for 16 weeks and is followed by a 26-week orientation.
“The first 10 weeks of the program involves the participants working in a skills lab which allows them to practice their skills in a safe environment. They then move to clinicals,” Raynor said.
Following the 16-week internship portion, the interns begin the orientation section of the program, where they rotate throughout the various service teams at Southwest. The orientation gives the RNs a chance to experience work in different practice settings found throughout the hospital.
They rotate through specialties such as gynecology, ENT, plastic surgery, neurology and orthopedics, Raynor said. If nurses find they are interested in a more specialized service line, such as robotics or CVOR, they will have the option of exploring their area of interest in greater depth in the future.
Interns and staff RNs are videotaped as they perform periOperative patient simulation exercises.
“The whole idea of the 16-week program is to build a foundation, and then go to the shift that they’ve been hired into and start working as independently as possible,” she said.
Because of the specialized nature of the OR in general, many nurses find that it takes about 18 months to feel completely comfortable in the operating room. The intern program is set up in such a way that it allows nurses the opportunity and freedom to work independently, but they also have the resources around them to ask for additional assistance when needed.
The program is designed for nurses of all skill levels and specialties, and provides a venue for experienced nurses to explore a new specialty and for new nurses to gain that all-important clinical experience.
“When we first started the program we decided not to take new grads because we were new to the program, and just getting started,” Raynor explained. “As we got into the program, we realized that new grads would be great for this.”
The hospital is currently doing about one class a year, and each session includes an average of five nurses. Candidates have been applying from all across the nation, and the nurses are selected and reviewed on an individual basis, with an emphasis on education, critical thinking skills, life and career experiences, and overall ability.
“We want the best applicants we can get,” Raynor said. “We have had ER nurses, hospice nurses and other nurses of all different specialties and scopes in the program so far. We have even had someone with experience in the correctional system. We look at every person and how we can grow them to be the best nurse possible.”
Raynor hopes that the program at Southwest and other nurse internship programs will help to develop more qualified candidates for specialties that need extra training and additional education.
“One thing about OR nursing is it isn’t really taught in nursing schools,” she noted. “We are hidden behind closed doors and we want to open it up. There really is that need for places to have these internal programs with AORN setting the standards.”
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