Advancing perioperative care

Demands are continuing to grow for perioperative practitioners to gain more skills and higher levels of education. These pressures are resulting, in part, from the changing structures within the health service, developments in the medical sciences, the reallocation of roles and responsibilities among healthcare professionals and the recognition by perioperative nurses of their own need for further education to meet these challenges. A response has been the creation of a widening range of new courses giving practitioners opportunities to study at higher degree level. In this article, Paul Wicker and Rebecca Strachan explain how one such programme has been brought into being.