Guidelines for Perioperative Practice
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Safe Surgery Together
AORN's Guidelines for Perioperative Practice are the gold-standard in evidence-based recommendations to deliver safe perioperative patient care and achieve workplace safety.
Online Access to the Guidelines for Your Entire Facility
eGuidelines Plus is an online facility subscription providing access to the most
current AORN Guidelines for Perioperative Practice complete with tools, customizable templates and resources to empower your team to apply standardized techniques facility-wide.
Existing eGuidelines Plus subscriber? Login here
AORN member looking for Guideline Essentials? Login here
Guidelines for Perioperative Practice, 2026 Edition
The 2026 edition of the AORN Guidelines for Perioperative Practice includes 36 Guidelines with critical updates on today’s most essential perioperative safety topics.
Updated Perioperative Practice Guidelines in the 2026 Edition:
- Transmission-Based Precautions: Updated evidence from COVID-19 pandemic research, including new risk-assessment frameworks to apply the right precautions at the right time.
- Pneumatic Tourniquet Safety: Includes a new formula and decision tree for inflation pressure and duration as well as new recommendations for collaboration, tourniquet selection, deflation, and injury identification.
- Autologous Tissue Management: New guidance on interdisciplinary collaboration, cranial bone flap preservation, microbial tissue culturing, competency verification, and quality assurance/ performance improvement activities.
- Instrument Cleaning: Includes the latest best practices for keeping instruments moist before cleaning, including borescope inspection as part of a comprehensive visual inspection and cleaning verification program, and standardizing external transport procedures.
- Safe Use of Surgical Energy Devices: Broader scope to reflect modern practice with updated guidance for safe use of return electrodes, multiple ESUs, and implanted electronic devices.
- Care of the Patient Receiving Local-Only Anesthesia: New recommendations on optimizing a local-only anesthesia care plan and identifying and responding to local anesthetic systemic toxicity (LAST).
Get the Guidelines in Every Format
Purchase via credit card by ordering through the AORN store. Purchase via facility purchase order by following the instructions on the Facility Order Form.
The foundational, hard copy source of evidence-based perioperative guidelines needed in every OR.
Conveniently access the same content as the print book on your mobile device or tablet.
Access to the guidelines plus 100s of tools that serve as the building blocks to implementing the guidelines facility-wide.
Need the Guidelines Book Before 2026?
The 2025 edition is still available to ship in print while supplies last. For instant access, purchase the 2025 eBook today.
For the most current updates, make sure your facility pre-orders the 2026 edition.
How the Guidelines are Developed
- Guideline Infographic - Learn more about the steps in how an AORN guideline is created. This easy-to-read reference can be used as a handy reference tool for your entire perioperative team.
- AORN’s Evidence Model - Learn how AORN's evidence model ensures clinical decisions are based on the latest research. Many state health organizations and accreditation bodies refer to AORN’s Guidelines in annual surveys.
- Public Commenting - Get involved with the publication of guidelines through the public commenting process. Comments are reviewed by the guideline author(s) and considered for inclusion.
Guideline Education Resources
This online facility subscription provides access to the most current AORN Guidelines for Perioperative Practice and comes with a complete set of implementation tools and resources to empower your team to apply standardized techniques facility-wide.
AORN’s Knowledge Assessment is an online evaluation designed to identify the knowledge gaps of experienced nurses and travelers.
This course will help you bridge the knowledge gaps that exist by helping you accurately assess nursing practice competencies and target education to the individual’s specific areas of weakness.
