The United States is experiencing a nursing shortage that is expected to worsen significantly during the next two decades. Specialty units that require additional and unique training for nurses, including perioperative nursing units, already are reporting critical shortages. (1,2) The current perioperative nursing shortage is the result of several trends:

* an aging nursing workforce,

* an aging population that requires more health care services,

* technological innovations that create a constantly changing work environment, and

* the lack of exposure of nursing students to perioperative clinical experiences. (3)

The majority of future specialty nurses are new graduates from nursing programs; however, if new graduates have had little or no experience in perioperative clinical areas, it is unlikely that they will choose to work in these units. (4 )After graduation, nurses generally choose to work in areas in which they had the most clinical experience as students. (1)

The most aggressively recruited specialists today are perioperative nurses, clinical nurse specialists, medical/surgical specialists, critical care nurses, emergency services nurses, and obstetric nurses. (5) Insufficient numbers of trained perioperative nurses may lead to the hiring of staff members who are not nurses but who can be trained in technical tasks. Patients are most vulnerable when they are sedated or anesthetized, however, and one of a perioperative nurse’s major responsibilities is to be the patient’s advocate in the OR. (6) If there is no professional nurse to speak for the patient, patient care may suffer.