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By: Emily McKisson, MS, BSN, RN, CNOR
Published: 10/27/2023
At my institution, we have a weekly orientation meeting that is coveted by orientee nurses and surgical technologists. This hour-long meeting is reserved for educational topics and overall team building. Instead of adding information to presentation slides, which is sometimes necessary, we try to offer educational activities that match the preferred learning style of our orientees: kinesthetic. Kinesthetic learners prefer active engagement during the learning process. While it is often challenging to plan and implement, our education team has deployed a few interesting methods of teaching that feature active engagement. As an educator, it is incredibly humbling to see the transition in knowledge and skill from the first week to six months.
One method for reviewing facility policy and procedures is to incorporate topics into a beach ball game. As in, the inflatable, colorful ball next to the shovel, rake, and other sand toys currently sitting unused in your garage. These balls are ideal because they have colored sections that divide their entire surface.
We use a label maker to add in category names of the policies and procedures we want to review. Topics that we have included as sections on the beach ball are surgical counts, aseptic technique, fire safety, perioperative attire, potpourri, and random facts. All of these are self-explanatory, except the potpourri and random facts sections. The potpourri section is a hodge-podge of questions that do not fit into another category and often represent a review of low-frequency, high-risk topics (eg, questions related surgical consent, do-not-resuscitate suspension, and tourniquet times). The overwhelmingly favorite category is random facts. For this category, the educators ask orientees to provide a random fact about themselves that others would not know. This section gave the orientees the most surprises! Examples of some possible questions and answers are found in Sidebar 1.
To play the game, the educators start by having the orientees sit in a circle. An educator randomly throws the ball to an orientee. The orientee who catches it, presumably with two hands, is asked to identify the section of the beach ball that is touching their right thumb. Once identified, they get a corresponding question from the educator’s question-and-answer bank. They are given a first chance to answer and, if unsuccessful, the group can respond. Next, the orientee who answered the question is tasked with throwing the beach ball to another person of their choice. The game continues until all questions are answered.
Beach ball policy and procedure review could be easily used in a staff in-service or small group session. This is a fun and innovative way to review important topics while also encouraging team participation. And, thankfully, beach balls are easy to find and inexpensive to buy. Best wishes as you plan your first beach ball game!
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