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.