Post-Op Patient Visits: An Innovative Way to Engage Nurses

Post-Op Patient Visits: An Innovative Way to Engage Nurses

August 14, 2022

In today’s challenging staffing climate, leaders are getting creative to keep nurses engaged, especially in community hospitals already working with staffing challenges.

At The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, N.J., Clinical Practice Specialist Bonnie Weinberg, MSN, RN, CNOR, and her director, Donna Lagasi, RN, BSN, MS-HCM, CNOR, decided to think outside of the box to increase the emotional commitment perioperative nurses have to their organization.

They wondered if giving OR nurses a chance to visit patients once they were awake and recovering would help nurses feel connected with their patients and their work on a different level.

Weinberg proposed a pilot study to measure nurse engagement following post-op visits, which she presented in an award-winning poster at AORN’s 2022 annual conference last April.

The pilot study is now underway, so we checked in with Weinberg and she says that, so far, her nurse colleagues are enjoying their time being able to visit patients after surgery and connect with them in a different way. “Seeing your patients the next day can fill you with a sense of how important the work we do is and can be the last page-turner in the storybook” of their care.

Coordinating the logistics to enable post-op visits does require advance planning, Weinberg notes. She suggests these three tips for anyone looking to implement a similar approach to boost nurse engagement:

1. Get OR Leadership Involved

Make sure the managers on the floors are aware the OR team members may be doing post-op visits, so they know why you’re coming, Weinberg advises. “Our leaders were thrilled when I told them and felt it was truly worthwhile.”

2. Prepare Your Nurses

Perioperative nurses participating in Weinberg’s study were prepped before their first visit with ideas for starting the conversation and being prepared to field any clinical questions from the patient back to the floor nurse. “We encouraged our nurses to introduce themselves, briefly describe their role in the patient’s surgical care, and share why they were visiting.”

3. Measure Nurse Satisfaction

Collect and share data from your nurses’ experiences with post-op visits because these results can engage your team and hopefully encourage leadership to incorporate post-op visits into everyday practice, Weinberg stresses.

Tracking patient satisfaction from these visits may also be valuable, she says, based on consistently positive feedback from patients that nurses in the study are hearing. “Patients have been happily surprised that their OR nurse would take time to check on them.”