Rick van Loon

Background

About Rick van Loon

How should learning and working be bridged in a living lab to foster resilient and sustainable perioperative nurses? Perioperative care is facing major challenges for several reasons, including rapid advancements of technological innovations within this context. These innovations introduces a new layer of complexity, requiring perioperative nurses to adapt to and communicate with these innovations. The synergy of human skills and technological integration foretells a future in which surgical patients experience improved quality and access to healthcare. However, it is unclear what skills and competencies are required for perioperative nurses to be capable to work in the operating room in a resilient and sustainable way. This drives the need to evaluate the establishment of an environment that embraces continual advancements, and encourages a culture of lifelong learning and growth among perioperative nurses. A living lab is such a real-world environment where learning and working are bridged in an interprofessional way by fostering innovation, research, and education, based on authentic principles. Working together at the intersection of education and practice in a living lab is a new phenomenon in the perioperative context, and fits the pressing need to envision the operating room as a future-proof learning and working environment. In order to cultivate future-proof perioperative nurses who amid the continuous flow of innovations and technology in the perioperative context over the next decade, this project focuses on the way a living lab should be organized to bridge learning and working in this setting, and on skills that perioperative nurses need to require for resilient and sustainable learning and working with continuous innovations in the operating room of the future.