1 Big Step You Can Take to Help Periop Nurse Grads Flourish

Feeling tense and fearing the worst, new nurses in the late 2020 periop cohort at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic were experiencing obvious signs of anxiety as they began their transition to practice at Inova Fairfax Medical Campus in Falls Church, VA.

Why? They had experienced only virtual simulation training due to the pandemic to prepare them for hands-on clinical care. “These new grads needed a healthy dose of confidence,” said perioperative clinical mentor Madeleine Ly, BSN, RN, CNOR.

Ly and fellow perioperative educator Gini Beatty, MSN, RN, NPD-BC, CNOR, worked to alleviate their new periop nurses’ anxiety by helping to implement hands-on training through the Inova System New Graduate Nurse Boot Camp—a system-wide approach to teach basic clinical skills the nurses would need immediately to care for the organization’s high-acuity patient population. “We wanted them to understand that nursing is a team sport and there will always be resources available when help is needed.”

They shared details about the boot camp in a research poster at AORN’s 2023 annual conference.

With anxiety and low self-confidence still a struggle among new periop nurses these days, we asked how they helped create their boot camp and incorporated the knowledge gained into periop-specific training.

Confidence-Boosting Boot Camp At-A-Glance

The system-wide boot camp started with a one day, six-hour event that covered basic clinical skills, such as:

• Properly donning and doffing PPE
• Managing patient deterioration
• Practicing emergency Code Blue roles and responsibilities
• Implementing wound care
• Using team communication

“We conducted follow-up training with the new periop graduates to demonstrate how these clinical skills apply to the periop world as part of their perioperative fellowship training, with combined didactic and hands-on learning,” Ly explains. For example, an exercise of a patient deteriorating supported discussion of sepsis and the MEWS scale and rolled into a tabletop exercise on prioritization.

Resilience training was also provided through three one-hour sessions over the course of the orientation. The goal was to equip new nurses with skills for stress management and coping to help them reduce anxiety and promote effective practice in the long-term.

Cutting Anxiety in Half

To formally measure improvement among this first cohort of new nurses, Ly and Beatty gathered the perioperative nurses’ perceived self-confidence and anxiety data with the White Tool Scale during week two of their orientation and then again at the end.

“Post boot camp, we noted a 30 percent increase in self-confidence and reduction of anxiety by 50 percent at the three-month mark,” Ly says.

Three years later, Ly, Beatty and the System Professional Practice Team have continued to refine the education to fit current needs, such as focusing on wellbeing to improve self-care.

“In our roles as professional practice educators, we get to continually engage with our newest RNs, helping them transition from student nurse to practicing nurse, and this boot camp was an effective approach to make this transition a positive experience,” Ly shares. “We’ve also seen a reduction in new graduate nurse turnover since the introduction of boot camp.”

Ly and Beatty’s poster on Alleviating Anxiety in Perioperative New Graduate RNs: Boot Camp in the Age of COVID-19 is available through the AORN Expo 2023 Virtual Pass. Review their strategies and results to reduce new nurses’ anxiety in your own practice setting.