Prepare for OR / Perioperative with confidence

What your OR 90-day path covers

• ✓The preoperative assessment: what the room needs to know before the patient arrives
• ✓Consent, capacity and the patient who cannot confirm
• ✓Fasting, medication and optimization before the incision
• ✓Skin preparation, hair removal and normothermia before incision
• ✓Site marking and the Universal Protocol
• ✓The time-out: what it is for and why it fails
• ✓Wrong-site, wrong-patient and wrong-procedure surgery
• ✓The circulating nurse: the role that holds the room
• ✓The scrub role: the field, the instruments and the anticipation
• ✓Anesthesia in the room: what the nurse needs to know before, during and at the end
• ✓Electrosurgery, energy devices and the burn nobody sees
• ✓Positioning principles: what an anesthetized body cannot do for itself
• ✓Nerve injury: the mechanisms and the positions that cause them
• ✓Pressure injury in the operating room
• ✓Thermal management, thromboprophylaxis and the rest of intraoperative safety
• ✓The sterile field: creating it, maintaining it, and what breaks it
• ✓Surgical hand antisepsis, gowning, gloving and attire
• ✓Instrument processing, sterilization and immediate use
• ✓Surgical site infection: the bundle and the evidence behind it
• ✓Hemostasis: mechanical, energy-based and pharmacological
• ✓Blood loss estimation, transfusion and massive hemorrhage in the operating room
• ✓Patient blood management and the anticoagulated patient
• ✓Specimens: the chain that cannot break
• ✓Surgical counts and retained surgical items
• ✓The perioperative record
• ✓Surgical fire
• ✓Malignant hyperthermia and anaphylaxis in the operating room
• ✓Cardiac arrest and catastrophic hemorrhage in the operating room
• ✓Handover into and out of the operating room
• ✓Speaking up, hierarchy and the ability to stop the line
• ✓Briefings, debriefings and the Surgical Safety Checklist
• ✓General, gynecologic and laparoscopic surgery
• ✓Orthopedic and neurosurgery
• ✓Cardiac and vascular surgery

Start with a free gap analysis

Before you study anything, AscendRN's gap analysis shows you exactly where you stand across the ten competencies that matter for or / perioperative — patient assessment, pharmacology, prioritization, and more. You find your gaps here, in minutes, instead of at the bedside. Then your path adapts to close them.

Free to start. No card required.

Join thousands of nurses preparing for their specialty on AscendRN.