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Innovative celebrations for Perioperative Nurse Week
SEPTEMBER 2000, VOL 72, NO 3 PRESIDENT‘S MESSAGE
Innovative celebrations for Perioperative Nurse
T
wo months from now, perioperative nurses across the country will celebrate Perioperative Nurse Week-formerly known as OR Nurse Week-Nov 12 to 18. This year’s theme is “Perioperative Nurses: Healthcare with a Human Touch.” You may wonder why, in September, I am writing about Perioperative Nurse Week. This year I want to encourage you to forego the in-house celebrations and focus your energies in a different way, Take the opportunity to educate caregivers outside the OR and the public about the value of the care provided by perioperative nurses. I am sure you can think of many ways this can be done, but I will mention a few that come to mind.
EDUCATING OTHERS You could encourage your hospital administrators to “walk a day in your shoes.” Invite the chief executive officer (CEO) to be a perioperative nurse for a day, or even half a day. Assign him or her to an expert nurse as a working partner from the beginning of a shift. Make sure he or she sees this nurse working on case set up, patient interviews, intraoperative procedure completion, and room turnover. Approach this experience as an opportunity for the administrator to demonstrate that he or she is sensitive to staff members and wants to know what is involved in being a perioperative nurse. You might even write an article for your local paper about
how the administrator works to be sure he or she understands what is involved in patient care from the care provider’s perspective and from the patient’s perspective. Work with your hospital marketing department to make it a win-win situation for you, the CEO, and the hospital. I am certain we all can remember times when administrators served employees a meal, brought dessert to the unit, or gave out tshirts, lunch boxes, or pens. Employees may find it more significant to have administrators gain a greater appreciation for the complex duties required of perioperative nurses. What better way to do that than to encourage them to experience, first-hand, being a perioperative RN for a day? You also could consider inviting local school children into your OR. A few years ago, staff members at a hospital in South Carolina arranged for 500 school children to visit the OR department during OR Nurse Week. They took it one step further by inviting the local newspaper to cover the event. The children were given masks and scrub hats and shown instruments and equipment in the OR as they were told what nurses do to protect patients. The paper published this hospital’s story locally, and the entire facility was shown in a very positive light. Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in New Brunswick, NJ, took this idea one step further during Take Your Daughter to Work Day this year. Staff mem369 AORN JOURNAL
bers set up a mock OR to give their daughters and sons a close-up view of a surgical procedure. A picture BRENDA C. ULMER of the scene, complete with children in gowns, gloves, hats, and masks, appeared on the front page of the New York Times.‘ A demonstration such as this during Perioperative Nurse Week would be a great way to highlight the skills of perioperative nurses. This type of activity also helps expose young children to a future career choice. We need to get them while they are young and continue to cultivate their interest.
GETTING THE WORD OUT One of the best television advertisements I have seen related to nursing was in Columbus, Ohio. The Mount Camel School of Nursing developed a commercial with people from different walks of life saying, “Thank you for being a nurse.” It was very powerful. Why not make your own public service video and show people from a variety of professions also saying, “Thank you for being a perioperative nurse.”? You could tap into former patients thanking nurses for the care they received, or parents thanking the nurse for caring for their children. With the technology that is available today and the video skills of many of our nurses, this could be a simple project.
SEPTEMBER 2000, VOL 12, NO 3
Remember the success of the film The B b i r Witch Project. It was low tech and low budget as films go, but the impact was huge. This is an election year. Invite a local or national politician to be a patient and invite the media. Take the politician from admission to preoperative preparation to the OR to discharge. Have him or her change into an OR gown to experience the sense of helplessness and loss of identity patients experience when stripped of clothes and personal possessions. Encourage him or her to lie on the OR bed and breathe through a mask to gain an understanding of what patients feel when the mask goes on and how the overhead landscape truly looks alien. Health care is always a big issue in an election year. Creating a media event designed to educate the politician to make him or her appear more sensitive to the constituency can help you and the politician. Perioperative Nurse Week occurs close to Veterans Day, when many cities have parades. Arrange to make a mock OR on a float complete with perioperative nurses. You could make it a collaborative effort between several chapters. AORN of Atlanta did this one November, and it was a big hit. You could pass out fliers and buttons to the parade attendees saying, “Every patient deserves a perioperative nurse.” You might even consider including a couple of monitors on the float that continuously show a surgical procedure in process. The public is always enthralled to see an actual surgery in progress.
THE NIGHTINGALE CONNECTION I know that there is a great deal of creativity out there, and you can think of ways to get the message across to a wide range of people that you-the perioperative nurse-are essential to patient care in the OR. Use Perioperative Nurse Week to celebrate the life and work of Florence Nightingale. She was “. . . our visionary, innovative, courageous, and politically smart mother.”l What became her greatest work and set the course for her life began in November 1854 when she landed at Scutari during the Crimean War. Nightingale worked in every area of a hospital where the death rate was 50% to 60%.Her extensive efforts, “provided supplies of every kind-clothing, food, equipment, and surgical dressings for patients.”.’ You could say Nightingale was one of the fust perioperative nurses. Her efforts reduced the death rate among the British soldiers to an unheard of 22% and forever changed the course of health care and nursing. Nightingale is said to have been seen visiting patients at night carrying a lamp and going from bed to bed. She became known as “The Lady with the Lamp.” There was a play written in the 1920s of the same name, and another entitled, “Florence Nightingale: A Drama.” A unique way to celebrate Perioperative Nurse Week would be to do a presentation of one of these plays. Contact elementary, middle, and high schools in your area and offer to do a play or scenes from a play for a career day. Churches or other organizations also might be
NOTES 1. “Future OR nurses?” OR Manager 16 (June 2000) 1. 2. D J Mason, “Celebrating vision, innovation, and courage,” (editorial) American Journal of Nursing 99
presentation options to familiarize the public with a great nursing heroine and emphasize our desire to follow in her footsteps, HELPING OTHERS Contact the Habitat for Humanity representatives in your city and set up a workday for your chapter. People who participated on the Habitat house in New Orleans at AORN CongI.ess this year said that it was one of the most positive experiences they had ever had. Invite the media to show your AORN chapter’s efforts to help less fortunate people in your community. If your hospital has funds set aside to celebrate Perioperative Nurse Week, you could request that the money be donated instead to buy supplies for the house your chapter works on. If there are multiple chapters in your area, the donation in time and money could be very beneficial to a Habitat house recipient. These are just some suggestions on ways you can use Perioperative Nurse Week to help people understand what you do and why quality surgical care cannot happen without you-the perioperative nurse. Each of us is the best, the greatest, and the most effective ambassador for the profession. It is our obligation to ourselves and to our patients to ensure that the last eyes the patient sees before he or she goes to sleep or is covered with drapes are our eyes-the eyes of the perioperative RN. BRENDA C. ULMER RN, MN, CNOR PRESIDENT
(April 1999) 7. 3. L L Dock, I M Stewart, A Short History of Nursing: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day, fourth ed (New York: G P Putnam’s Sons, 1945) 121-125. 370
AORN JOURNAL
Innovative celebrations for Perioperative Nurse
T
wo months from now, perioperative nurses across the country will celebrate Perioperative Nurse Week-formerly known as OR Nurse Week-Nov 12 to 18. This year’s theme is “Perioperative Nurses: Healthcare with a Human Touch.” You may wonder why, in September, I am writing about Perioperative Nurse Week. This year I want to encourage you to forego the in-house celebrations and focus your energies in a different way, Take the opportunity to educate caregivers outside the OR and the public about the value of the care provided by perioperative nurses. I am sure you can think of many ways this can be done, but I will mention a few that come to mind.
EDUCATING OTHERS You could encourage your hospital administrators to “walk a day in your shoes.” Invite the chief executive officer (CEO) to be a perioperative nurse for a day, or even half a day. Assign him or her to an expert nurse as a working partner from the beginning of a shift. Make sure he or she sees this nurse working on case set up, patient interviews, intraoperative procedure completion, and room turnover. Approach this experience as an opportunity for the administrator to demonstrate that he or she is sensitive to staff members and wants to know what is involved in being a perioperative nurse. You might even write an article for your local paper about
how the administrator works to be sure he or she understands what is involved in patient care from the care provider’s perspective and from the patient’s perspective. Work with your hospital marketing department to make it a win-win situation for you, the CEO, and the hospital. I am certain we all can remember times when administrators served employees a meal, brought dessert to the unit, or gave out tshirts, lunch boxes, or pens. Employees may find it more significant to have administrators gain a greater appreciation for the complex duties required of perioperative nurses. What better way to do that than to encourage them to experience, first-hand, being a perioperative RN for a day? You also could consider inviting local school children into your OR. A few years ago, staff members at a hospital in South Carolina arranged for 500 school children to visit the OR department during OR Nurse Week. They took it one step further by inviting the local newspaper to cover the event. The children were given masks and scrub hats and shown instruments and equipment in the OR as they were told what nurses do to protect patients. The paper published this hospital’s story locally, and the entire facility was shown in a very positive light. Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in New Brunswick, NJ, took this idea one step further during Take Your Daughter to Work Day this year. Staff mem369 AORN JOURNAL
bers set up a mock OR to give their daughters and sons a close-up view of a surgical procedure. A picture BRENDA C. ULMER of the scene, complete with children in gowns, gloves, hats, and masks, appeared on the front page of the New York Times.‘ A demonstration such as this during Perioperative Nurse Week would be a great way to highlight the skills of perioperative nurses. This type of activity also helps expose young children to a future career choice. We need to get them while they are young and continue to cultivate their interest.
GETTING THE WORD OUT One of the best television advertisements I have seen related to nursing was in Columbus, Ohio. The Mount Camel School of Nursing developed a commercial with people from different walks of life saying, “Thank you for being a nurse.” It was very powerful. Why not make your own public service video and show people from a variety of professions also saying, “Thank you for being a perioperative nurse.”? You could tap into former patients thanking nurses for the care they received, or parents thanking the nurse for caring for their children. With the technology that is available today and the video skills of many of our nurses, this could be a simple project.
SEPTEMBER 2000, VOL 12, NO 3
Remember the success of the film The B b i r Witch Project. It was low tech and low budget as films go, but the impact was huge. This is an election year. Invite a local or national politician to be a patient and invite the media. Take the politician from admission to preoperative preparation to the OR to discharge. Have him or her change into an OR gown to experience the sense of helplessness and loss of identity patients experience when stripped of clothes and personal possessions. Encourage him or her to lie on the OR bed and breathe through a mask to gain an understanding of what patients feel when the mask goes on and how the overhead landscape truly looks alien. Health care is always a big issue in an election year. Creating a media event designed to educate the politician to make him or her appear more sensitive to the constituency can help you and the politician. Perioperative Nurse Week occurs close to Veterans Day, when many cities have parades. Arrange to make a mock OR on a float complete with perioperative nurses. You could make it a collaborative effort between several chapters. AORN of Atlanta did this one November, and it was a big hit. You could pass out fliers and buttons to the parade attendees saying, “Every patient deserves a perioperative nurse.” You might even consider including a couple of monitors on the float that continuously show a surgical procedure in process. The public is always enthralled to see an actual surgery in progress.
THE NIGHTINGALE CONNECTION I know that there is a great deal of creativity out there, and you can think of ways to get the message across to a wide range of people that you-the perioperative nurse-are essential to patient care in the OR. Use Perioperative Nurse Week to celebrate the life and work of Florence Nightingale. She was “. . . our visionary, innovative, courageous, and politically smart mother.”l What became her greatest work and set the course for her life began in November 1854 when she landed at Scutari during the Crimean War. Nightingale worked in every area of a hospital where the death rate was 50% to 60%.Her extensive efforts, “provided supplies of every kind-clothing, food, equipment, and surgical dressings for patients.”.’ You could say Nightingale was one of the fust perioperative nurses. Her efforts reduced the death rate among the British soldiers to an unheard of 22% and forever changed the course of health care and nursing. Nightingale is said to have been seen visiting patients at night carrying a lamp and going from bed to bed. She became known as “The Lady with the Lamp.” There was a play written in the 1920s of the same name, and another entitled, “Florence Nightingale: A Drama.” A unique way to celebrate Perioperative Nurse Week would be to do a presentation of one of these plays. Contact elementary, middle, and high schools in your area and offer to do a play or scenes from a play for a career day. Churches or other organizations also might be
NOTES 1. “Future OR nurses?” OR Manager 16 (June 2000) 1. 2. D J Mason, “Celebrating vision, innovation, and courage,” (editorial) American Journal of Nursing 99
presentation options to familiarize the public with a great nursing heroine and emphasize our desire to follow in her footsteps, HELPING OTHERS Contact the Habitat for Humanity representatives in your city and set up a workday for your chapter. People who participated on the Habitat house in New Orleans at AORN CongI.ess this year said that it was one of the most positive experiences they had ever had. Invite the media to show your AORN chapter’s efforts to help less fortunate people in your community. If your hospital has funds set aside to celebrate Perioperative Nurse Week, you could request that the money be donated instead to buy supplies for the house your chapter works on. If there are multiple chapters in your area, the donation in time and money could be very beneficial to a Habitat house recipient. These are just some suggestions on ways you can use Perioperative Nurse Week to help people understand what you do and why quality surgical care cannot happen without you-the perioperative nurse. Each of us is the best, the greatest, and the most effective ambassador for the profession. It is our obligation to ourselves and to our patients to ensure that the last eyes the patient sees before he or she goes to sleep or is covered with drapes are our eyes-the eyes of the perioperative RN. BRENDA C. ULMER RN, MN, CNOR PRESIDENT
(April 1999) 7. 3. L L Dock, I M Stewart, A Short History of Nursing: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day, fourth ed (New York: G P Putnam’s Sons, 1945) 121-125. 370
AORN JOURNAL