Spreadsheet and Relational Database Programs: Useful Tools for Perioperative Nurses

Abstract

Information management has become a critical skill for all nurse professionals, including perioperative registered nurses (RNs). In perioperative nursing, combinations of high-touch and high-tech patient needs require staff to be acutely aware clinically. Staff members are focused on responsibilities for assessing, monitoring, and intervening in specific patient situations and may miss the importance of learning to successfully manage amounts of data greater than those generated by one patient at one particular time. When staff nurses and managers begin to think about collecting evidence to demonstrate the quality of their performance or when they begin to express the wish to test their hunches about the factors that influence patient outcomes in their units the time to develop competencies in formal data management has arrived. Fortunately, the challenges of learning to organize and manipulate data do not approach the difficulty of the challenges faced by perioperative nurses in practice on a daily basis.