Perioperative Care

LPN Nursing Med-Surg Perioperative Care is the focus of this page, and it's built to help you feel ready for one of the most high-stakes areas you'll face as a practical nurse. Perioperative care covers everything that happens before, during, and after surgery — from preoperative patient assessments and informed consent checks to intraoperative safety protocols and postoperative monitoring for complications like hemorrhage, respiratory depression, and wound infection. If you're an LPN student heading into your Medical-Surgical rotation or preparing for your licensing exam, this is material you cannot afford to skim.

This page walks you through the three phases of perioperative care in a clear, organized way. You'll review how to prepare a patient for surgery, including NPO guidelines, skin prep, and baseline vital sign documentation. You'll look at your role in the intraoperative environment — understanding the surgical team, sterile field boundaries, and positioning safety. Then you'll dig into the recovery room and the nursing priorities that keep post-surgical patients safe: airway management, pain control, drainage monitoring, and early ambulation teaching. Each concept is tied to the kind of clinical thinking your instructors and examiners expect from you.

The best way to use this page is to read through the core content and then immediately put your knowledge to the test. Start a practice session using the questions tied to this topic so you can find out right away which concepts you've locked in and which ones need another look. Active recall — answering questions, checking rationales, and reviewing your wrong answers — is far more effective than rereading notes. You've put in the work to get here. Use these tools to make sure that work pays off on exam day.