Bright Ideas for Retaining Aging OR Nurses
Monday January 28, 2008
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Patricia C. Seifert, RN, MSN, CNOR, CRNFA, education coordinator for the cardiovascular OR at Inova Heart and Vascular Institute in Falls Church, Va., will address the topic at the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) 55th Congress. Her presentation will be one of several at the conference, which takes place March 30-April 3 in Anaheim, Calif.
“We can’t afford to have anyone retire,” says Seifert, who, after 30 years as a nurse, still works in the OR. “But at the same time, you can’t work people to death.”
“I would like younger nurses to see their more experienced colleagues as a wealth of knowledge and a valuable resource to help them succeed and improve,” she says.
Ways to make the job less physically demanding include reducing the amount of time a perioperative nurse is forced to stand, reducing the weight of surgical instruments by, for example, placing them on two trays instead of one, and employing lifting devices or other staff to help move patients.
“Sometimes pulling a patient over to his or her side requires a second person,” Seifert says. Not having help can be dangerous. “Back injuries are common injuries for healthcare workers.”
Encouraging older nurses, as well as OR nurses, to remain in the workforce is the focus of a 2006 report titled “Wisdom at Work: The Importance of the Older and Experienced Nurse in the Workplace.” The report, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, found that flexible hours, increased benefits, newly created professional roles, better-designed hospital equipment and buildings, and an atmosphere of respect for nurses contribute to keeping nurses in the workplace longer.
The lead author of the study, Barbara J. Hatcher, RN, PhD, MPH, director of the Center for Learning and Global Public Health at the American Public Health Association, said in an interview with Medscape that there is value in retaining older nurses.
“We believe that there are many healthy and vibrant nurses age 55 and older who can still contribute and will want to contribute,” she says. “The expert nurse brings her unusual perceptual ability and common-sense understanding about patient care to any situation.”
Ed Coakley, RN, MSN, MA, MEd, director emeritus at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, recently spearheaded a one-day conference titled “Coming of Age: Innovations to Support the Aging Nurse.” The conference, funded by a grant from the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology, resulted from a study in which older nurses said they hoped to work “until their backs gave out or their knees gave out or as long as they were able to physically work,” Coakley says.
One of the topics discussed was the role of robots in helping nurses provide patient care.
“Companies are beginning to design nursing-assistant robots that could help move patients from a bed to a chair and robots that could work in a person’s home,” he says.
Penelope’s inventor, Michael Treat, MD, a New York-area surgeon, has said the robot is not designed to replace OR nurses but, rather, to enhance the job they do by taking over repetitive tasks. Perioperative nurses always will be needed to step in in case something goes wrong, to handle medications and sponges, and to do things that require a human touch, such as talking with patients and their families.
Other ways to extend the careers of perioperative nurses, Seifert says, are through changes in IRS regulations that will allow older nurses to work without jeopardizing retirement or Social Security payments, eliminating mandatory on-call for older OR nurses, and subsidizing childcare for grandchildren.
It’s a mistake to focus on older OR nurses at the exclusion of the younger ones, Coakley says, when they can be helpful to each other. He suggests that older and younger nurses be teamed to mentor each other. Older nurses can mentor younger nurses in clinical knowledge and other abilities learned through the years, he says, while younger nurses can mentor older nurses in computers and seeing the world from a different perspective.
Scott Williams is a freelance writer.
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