Using an Academic-Practice Partnership to Implement a Perioperative Nursing Elective in a Baccalaureate Nursing Program.

Many perioperative nurses are reaching retirement age and hospital leaders are experiencing difficulty with maintaining staffing levels. When baccalaureate nursing students seek employment after graduation, they may not consider perioperative nursing because of a lack of familiarity with the specialty. Faculty members at one college of nursing collaborated with hospital leaders in Oklahoma and developed a perioperative nursing elective course to address this gap. During the first three years of the partnership, 34 students completed the course. Nine students accepted perioperative nurse externships and nine graduates accepted perioperative nurse positions. All the students who completed the perioperative nursing course passed the NCLEX-RN examination on the first attempt. The academic-practice leaders continue to offer the course as a strategy to recruit perioperative nurses in Oklahoma. This article describes a process for developing a perioperative nursing elective course to prepare baccalaureate nursing students for employment after graduation.