Educating for the future

The current lack of perioperative clinical rotations in nursing schools makes it imperative that perioperative nurses create ways to entice the next generation of nurses to work in the OR. At Danbury Hospital, Danbury, Connecticut, the OR manager and clinical educators looked at the challenges that nursing students face in the perioperative clinical setting and created an orientation to help to ease their fears about observing in the OR, familiarize them with the perioperative nursing role, and perhaps encourage more nursing students to consider perioperative nursing as a career. We used the "AORN guidance statement: The value of clinical learning activities in the perioperative setting in undergraduate nursing curricula" as a framework for a perioperative orientation class that addresses the challenges and meets the students' academic goals. We also used the nursing curriculum objectives from Western Connecticut State University, Danbury, to plan the students' clinical experience in surgery. Our approach has attracted more student interest in perioperative nursing than in previous years, resulting in more students requesting a perioperative clinical rotation or senior practicum.