The University of Tennessee Health Science Center’s College of Nursing has developed an Operating Room Scholars program to educate nursing students as perioperative nurses through the college’s Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program. Baptist Memorial Health Care is working with the UTHSC College of Nursing to develop the curriculum and pilot the program.
The program is designed to help address the shortage of perioperative nurses. A perioperative nurse fulfills nursing roles before, during, and after a patient’s surgical procedures. Like many nursing specialties, perioperative nursing has been affected by an overall nursing shortage. Open perioperative nursing positions have increased from 3% in 2012 to 11% in 2021, according to the industry publication OR Today. The OR Scholars program is launching this summer with two students in the inaugural cohort.
“This is an innovative pilot program designed to better prepare new graduates to work in the perioperative areas,” said UTHSC College of Nursing Dean Wendy Likes, PhD, DNSc, APRN-BC, FAANP. “The program will fill a critical need and has the potential to create a new way of preparing nurses for areas with the most critical shortages. We hope it will also decrease the time new nursing graduates must spend in orientation or residency at hospitals and assist in the retention of perioperative nurses.”
Read more at our UTHSC news site.