4 Steps to Organize Second Victim Peer Support

Emotional first aid for perioperative team members is needed more than ever due to persistent post-pandemic burnout and the risks of losing a patient during day-to-day care. Known as second victims, periop professionals dealing with occupational emotional strain often suffer in silence.

Yessenia V. Salgado, DNP, RN, NE-BC, CNOR, witnessed this suffering first-hand as a long time OR nurse leader who worked on the frontline before entering her current role as perioperative director at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. “I felt helpless with limited resources to support our team.”

As part of her doctoral study, she started to look into second victims and the benefits of peer support. This work led her on a journey to shape a multidisciplinary second victim peer support program for her own perioperative teams called, “Here2Hear,” an endeavor that required multiple layers of research, communication, stakeholder buy-in, executive approvals and planning.

Creating a Path to Peer Support

After three years of dedicated effort, Dr. Salgado’s nurse-led, multidisciplinary Here2Hear program has launched. She recently earned top honors for her poster on the steps of this journey at AORN’s annual conference in April.

“From the beginning, I knew a successful perioperative peer support program at our institution would need to be created for the multidisciplinary team, meaning that it would provide support for every single member of the perioperative team regardless of discipline or role,” Dr. Salgado said.

Here, she shares four important steps any perioperative nurse leader can take to achieve similar success:

1. Listen to different team members’ emotional needs—Meeting personally with leadership from each periop discipline helped Dr. Salgado to understand what they would require to approve the program. For example, surgeons wanted to understand how privacy and confidentiality between surgeons and Here2Hear team members would be secured.

2. Develop an evidence-based program that is applied equitably toward all staff—Dr. Salgado conducted an extensive literature review as part of her post-doctoral research that she used to shape a theoretical model for the Here2Hear program, such as understanding how to meet the established needs of second victims and how to achieve cost effectiveness with launching the program.

3. Create policies, procedures and training for peer support staff—By partnering with an established second victim peer support program at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Dr. Salgado learned more about program needs and arranged for MGH peer support experts to train Here2Hear supporter team members.

4. Secure executive leadership stakeholders—This encompassed a multi-step process to obtain legal status for the program, establish an electronic infrastructure for the program, and create a formal manuscript defining the program for executive leadership to sign.

Securing program approval and starting training for Here2Hear team members is an exciting milestone after years of work, Dr. Salgado shared. “We’ve created an opportunity for any perioperative worker to get that immediate emotional first aid they need to care for themselves so they can continue to care for others.”

Get all the details from Dr. Salgado’s work by viewing her poster through the AORN Expo Virtual Pass to posters, breakout education sessions and more from AORN’s 2023 annual conference.