Establishing clinical competence in postanesthesia care nursing

Today the manager in postanesthesia care is faced with the reality that basic nursing education and general nursing practice do not provide the specific body of knowledge required to prepare nurses to deliver competent nursing care for patients in the PACU phase I. This, in addition to the growing shortage of critical care nurses, the diminishing dollars available for education, and the massive amounts of knowledge being added almost daily to the basic knowledge base specific to the postanesthesia care area, requires the successful PACU manager to develop methods to select personnel with the highest success potential and to establish a competency-based, unit-specific education program to ensure individual success.