AORN's Guidelines for Perioperative Practice Replace Recommended Practices

This week the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) announced its intention to change the title of the Perioperative Recommended Practices to Guidelines for Perioperative Practice. The new title will become official with the publication of the Guidelines for Perioperative Practice in January 2015.

“Our decision to retitle is primarily driven by the acceptance of our evidence-based recommended practices by the National Guidelines Clearinghouse (NGC) as nationally recognized guidelines for perioperative practice,” says Linda Groah, MSN, RN, CNOR, NEA-BC FAAN, AORN’s executive director/CEO. “We believe this new title for our renowned flagship product better conveys the value of our association’s recommendations for safe perioperative practice.” The National Guidelines Clearinghouse is a publicly available database of evidence based clinical practice guidelines.

The Institute of Medicine’s “Clinical Practice Guideline” describes guidelines as a “systematically developed statement to assist practitioner and patient decisions about appropriate health care for specific clinical circumstances.”  The AORN Recommended Practices meets the definition of a clinical practice guideline. AORN Recommended Practices documents are evidence-based; the individual references are now appraised and scored, and the recommendations are evidence-rated according to strength and quality of the evidence supporting the recommendation using the recently developed AORN Evidence Rating Model. This systems approach enables AORN to meet the submission criteria and to be accepted by the NGC.

AORN represents the interests of more than 160,000 perioperative nurses by providing nursing education, standards, and practice resources-including the peer-reviewed, monthly publication AORN Journal-to enable optimal outcomes for patients undergoing operative and other invasive procedures. AORN’s 40,000 registered nurse members manage, teach, and practice perioperative nursing, are enrolled in nursing education or are engaged in perioperative research. Its members include perioperative nurses who work in hospitals, ambulatory and office-based settings and in related business and industry sectors. AORN’s mission is to promote safety and optimal outcomes for patients undergoing operative and other invasive procedures by providing practice support and professional development opportunities to perioperative nurses.

Source: AORN