Recruiting and Retaining Generation Y Perioperative Nurses

The future of perioperative nursing will be in the hands of Generation Y (ie, Millennial) nurses by the beginning of the next decade. With three million Baby Boomers turning 65 years of age each year for the next 20 years (ie, from 2015 to 2035), it is anticipated that Generation Y will comprise 50% of the nursing workforce by 2020.1 Demographic transformations have been described as dramas in slow motion, because they unfold incrementally before the aha moment suddenly reveals that the world has changed.2 This is likely to happen in the perioperative nursing workforce and will affect succession planning. Peri-operative nurse leaders and personnel working in the surgical area are older than nurses in other specialty areas.3 As noted in recent research published in Health Affairs, historical patterns for nursing retirements have changed during the past two decades: 74% of nurses are working at 62 years of age and 24% at 69 years of age.4 Perioperative nursing has beneted from these trends, but at some point these nurses will begin to retire in signicant numbers.