Spotlight On: Katelynn Vaughan

By Don Sadler

Almost any OR nurse can tell you about the lack of exposure to perioperative education in most nursing schools. Katelynn Vaughan is determined to do something about this.

As the surgical hospital clinical educator at OCOM Hospital in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Katelynn develops and implements competency-based education programs to ensure clinical excellence and regulatory compliance. This includes designing and delivering education encompassing patient safety, high-level disinfection, critical lab reporting, emergency response and equipment competencies.

“My experience when I first started working in the OR was that ‘this is what we do, this is how we’ve always done it,’” Katelynn says. “They really didn’t teach evidence-based practice, which made it difficult as a new OR nurse. I had to learn the hard way.”

Katelynn started her nursing career as a step-down ICU nurse at Integris Hospital in Oklahoma City. “After about a year and half, I realized that’s not what I was meant to be doing,” she says. “So, I started looking around and soon applied to be a PACU nurse at another hospital. The OR director saw my resume and asked if I’d like to apply for an operating room position.”

“I shadowed and fell in love with the OR right away,” says Katelynn. “It was fast-paced and kept me challenged with something different every day.”

Katelynn worked as an OR circulator at OCOM Hospital from 2015-2020 and an OR manager from 2020-2024 before becoming the clinical educator. “Education is where my passion is because of the lack of resources available, especially for OR nurses in smaller hospitals,” she says. “Evidence-based practice can be difficult to prioritize when you lack staffing or administrative support.

“The overall goal is to make sure we’re delivering safe, up-to-date evidence-based care to every patient,” Katelynn says.

While Katelynn misses working hands-on in the OR, she gets a lot of satisfaction out of educating other nurses. “I realized that teaching is where my heart is,” she says. “I feel like I can break complicated things down and make them more simplistic. I really enjoy watching fellow nurses do something they couldn’t do before and seeing everything click for them.”

Katelynn obtained the CNOR certification in 2023 and returned to school to obtain a BS in nursing in 2024. “These were big celebration moments for me because no one can take away your education,” she says. “Coming from a hospital where no other nurses were nationally certified made it especially meaningful.”

In recent years, Katelyn has been active in the effort to get surgical smoke evacuation legislation passed in the state of Oklahoma. “I had been working as an OR nurse for seven years and never knew anything about how bad surgical smoke is until I heard about it at an AORN conference,” she says. “I started looking into it and realized I had some of the symptoms, like nausea and migraine headaches. I kept asking, ‘How do we at the hospital not know about this?’”

Katelynn led efforts at her hospital to have surgical smoke evacuated from operating rooms. “I had good support from the administration, but some doctors pushed back for no other reason than they didn’t want to change.” Katelynn persisted, working with AORN and the Oklahoma Nurses Association to get surgical smoke evacuation legislation introduced.

In October, Katelynn testified in the state capitol – along with Brenda Ulmer and JD Buchert, who have been instrumental in getting surgical smoke evacuation legislation passed in other states – about how surgical smoke had negatively affected her health.

“Katelynn did an excellent job and continues to work toward getting legislation passed in Oklahoma,” Brenda says.

Katelynn encourages young nurses to get involved in policy and advocacy. “As perioperative nurses, we have the ability to influence policy not just in our hospitals, but at the state and national levels,” she says. “I think it’s really important for nurses to know this because one person really can make a difference.”

As an active participant in AORN, Katelynn serves on the AORN National Committee on Education, the AORN eChapter Nominating Committee and as the president of the AORN of Central Oklahoma Chapter. “Going to my first AORN conference changed the trajectory of my career,” she says. “I was surrounded by so many people who wanted to learn and become better and were so passionate about what they were doing. I’d never been around people like that before.”

Outside of work, Katelynn is actively engaged in community outreach, supporting food drives and holiday initiatives that provide essential resources, including meals and Christmas gifts, to children in OKDHS foster care. She spent some time in foster care herself as a child, which makes her work especially meaningful. “I remember what it was like as a kid not knowing if you were going to get a Christmas gift,” she says.

Katelynn and her husband Trevor started dating when they were 15 years old and have two young children: 8-year-old Harper and 4-year-old River. “We love spending time together outdoors as a family,” she says. “These days, we spend a lot of time running Harper and River back and forth from soccer and cheerleading.”