3 Steps to Adopt 70 Practice Updates for 2023

By: AORN Staff

Published: 1/6/2023

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Your team’s first order of business in the new year should be to update surgical safety practices. That’s according to the 70 new AORN practice recommendations in eight revised 2023 Guidelines for Perioperative Practice that just published.

These new evidence-based updates comprise the most practice updates AORN has ever released in a single year.

With such a comprehensive list of updates to implement, we asked Guidelines Editor-in-Chief Erin Kyle, DNP, RN, CNOR, NEA-BC, for advice on the most efficient approach. She says, “teams need to take a systematic approach to first understand what the changes are, and then build an interdisciplinary plan to implement practice changes.”

Many of these changes are big ones, she admits, such as moving to sterilization for validated flexible endoscopes, implementing adjunct technology to prevent retained surgical items, and potentially switching to a periop-relevant risk assessment for pressure injury.

To streamline your process for implementing Guidelines updates, Kyle suggested these three steps:

Step 1: Understand the Practice Changes as a Team

Your entire periop team needs to understand what the changes are so they can plan accordingly, Kyle stresses. To start with, here are the  seven guideline updates and one new guideline in the 2023 edition:

  • Information Management
  • Hand Hygiene
  • Positioning the Patient
  • Prevention of Perioperative Pressure Injury (new)
  • Product Evaluation
  • Flexible Endoscopes
  • Prevention of Venous Thromboembolism
  • Minimally Invasive Surgery

Step 2: Use Guideline-Specific Tools to Update Practice Resources

Next, teams need to update practice resources for their respective roles, Kyle stresses. “Your educators need clinical information to standardize practice, your leadership needs to prepare for regulatory compliance and update policies and procedures, and your staff RNs need access to answers in their day-to-day practice.”

She suggests accessing implementation Tools searchable by guideline in eGuidelines+, the online, subscription-based home for the Guidelines. Start with these Tools:

  • Implementation road maps—to identify guideline-specific actions for team members
  • Key takeaways—highlighting what is new in each guideline
  • Gap analyses—to assess where guideline-specific improvements can be focused
  • Policy and procedure templates—to easily incorporate new guideline recommendations into practice

Kyle explains, “These Tools are updated alongside a guideline revision to help teams more efficiently implement evidence-based practice updates in any perioperative practice setting.”

Step 3: Champion New Evidence-Based Practices

“Learning about these practice updates should be exciting for perioperative teams to review together because the changes often provide new evidence to support practices that keep our patients and team members safe,” Kyle stresses.

She encourages every periop nurse to champion these 2023 Guidelines updates and bring the excitement of safer surgery to the team. “You don’t have to be in a formal leadership role to be a champion for evidence-based practice.”

Get the inside scoop on practice updates from the Guidelines authors at Global Surgical Conference & Expo in San Antonio, TX, April 1–4. Don’t miss the Flexible Endoscope guideline update presentation by lead author Amber Wood, MSN, RN, CNOR, CIC, and other discussions related to practice updates.