By Don Sadler
Back in the day, some may remember candy stripers – hospital volunteers who were named for the red-and-white striped uniforms they wore. For many of these volunteers, this was their first exposure to working in a hospital.
Renae Battié was one of them. “This is what really got nursing on my radar,” Renae says. Based on her positive experiences, Renae decided to attend nursing school, obtaining her BSN degree from the University of Washington.
Renae was fortunate to get several weeks of operating room experience during her time in school.
“It’s rare that you see this in nursing school anymore, but it was really impactful for me,” she says. “Seeing inside the human body was so cool, and I just loved the coordination of the team and the amazing technology in the OR.”
During her senior year of nursing school, Renae was able to participate in an intern program at a local hospital where she got to scrub cases once a week. With this experience, she was hired into an operating room position as a new nursing school graduate. This was the beginning of a long and successful perioperative nursing career.
From the beginning, Renae was drawn to the patient care aspects of perioperative nursing. “When patients are first wheeled into the OR, it’s noisy and everybody’s busy and they’re like, ‘What’s going on?’ I help calm their nerves and hold their hand through this experience.”
In 2019, Renae stepped away from nearly a half-century of delivering and managing the delivery of perioperative care to assume the role of vice president, nursing with the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN). In this role, she’s responsible for management and growth of the education, evidence-based practice and publishing departments for the professional membership organization.
“I describe my role as the nursing leader for content at AORN in terms of our educational resources, guidelines and everything that we publish,” says Renae, who had been actively involved with AORN for many years before assuming the role. This included serving on the AORN board of directors from 2010-2012, as the AORN vice president from 2012-2014 and as the AORN president in 2015-2016.
Renae says the most rewarding part of her job is “watching really smart, talented people create impactful resources. There has always been a strong education team at AORN that puts out great products and resources, but I didn’t realize the extent until I started working here.”
For example, Renae points to AORN’s learning experience designers (LXDs).
“They have completely transformed how we deliver education from both the technical and experiential sides, and they bring a whole learner approach based on the evidence from their backgrounds,” Renae says. “I’m in awe of what they do.”
Renae became AORN vice president of nursing right before the COVD-19 pandemic, which presented huge challenges for the organization. “It obviously had a huge impact on how many live events we could do and forced us to get creative with how to provide resources in a new way,” she says. “Live events for everyone took a big hit and everyone has had to shape them for a different reality.”
A persistent challenge Renae faces as a perioperative educator is the amount of information out there that isn’t evidence-based. “There’s a lot that’s just good information but it’s not necessarily based on the level of evidence that we intensely work to keep updated all the time,” she says. This includes information generated by AI, which has to be carefully checked.
One of Renae’s favorite memories from her long perioperative nursing career was when she was caring for a high school friend of her brother’s who was having surgery for a brain tumor.
“My brother saw her 20 years later at a high school reunion and she told him how much it meant having someone in the operating room with her who she felt like she knew, and for me to go out into the waiting room and talk to her family,” says Renae.
Renae stresses how much respect nurses all over the world have for AORN. “It has been such a privilege to represent AORN globally – from China to Rome to Australia. Wherever I am, I’m always treated so well as a representative of AORN.”
While some people worry about AI potentially minimizing the human aspects of nursing, Renae downplays these concerns. “While AI can provide support in bringing information together more quickly, it will never replace the connection of one human being to another,” she says. “There will always be a need for the human aspects of perioperative nursing.”
As a native of the Pacific Northwest and resident of Seattle, Renae loves the outdoors – whether it’s hiking, cycling, skiing or water sports. “I’m fortunate that I have a husband who also loves doing these things together,” she says. Renae also loves gardening, cooking and travelling “to explore this amazing world that we live in.”
One of Renae’s favorite trips was a culinary trip to Morocco with her girlfriends. “What an amazing country,” she says. “I was surprised how much I loved it – the people, the colors, the food. That was a very special experience.”
Professional Spotlight Nomination
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