Registered Nurse (RN) - Quality Improvement Coordinator, Perioperative Services

Bring your clinical insight, quality mindset, and perioperative experience to a role where improvement work has a direct effect on surgical care, frontline teams, and patient outcomes.

As a Registered Nurse (RN) Quality Improvement Coordinator with UVA Health Perioperative Services, you will help lead data-driven improvement initiatives across a complex surgical environment that includes the Main Operating Room, with collaboration across Main Pre-Op and Main PACU.

This is an opportunity for an RN who enjoys solving operational problems, working with metrics, partnering with clinical leaders, and helping build the future of perioperative quality improvement at an academic health system.

The Role

This role is designed for a nurse who can connect the realities of frontline clinical practice with structured quality improvement, analytics, and operational problem solving. You will serve as a strategic quality partner within Perioperative Services, helping identify opportunities, analyze performance data, support action planning, and validate whether improvement efforts are producing meaningful results.

In an average day, you may be reviewing quality or operational data, collaborating with Clinical Nurse Leaders and Clinical Nurse Specialists, meeting with perioperative leadership, engaging frontline teams, and helping translate an improvement opportunity into a measurable plan of action. The work is highly collaborative, intellectually engaging, and well suited for someone who enjoys both the clinical environment and the structure of formal improvement methodology.

Key areas of focus include:

• Leading quality improvement efforts across perioperative workflows, clinical operations, and patient care processes.

• Using data to identify trends, prioritize opportunities, measure outcomes, and validate results.

• Applying Lean principles, A3 thinking, current-state and future-state analysis, and structured problem-solving approaches.

• Partnering closely with Clinical Nurse Leaders, Clinical Nurse Specialists, Quality Improvement Coordinators, frontline nurses, and perioperative leadership.

• Supporting action plans that improve patient outcomes, operational effectiveness, team performance, and perioperative reliability.

• Helping strengthen a developing perioperative quality infrastructure with room to influence future structure and direction.

• Collaborating across the Main OR, Main Pre-Op, Main PACU, and potentially additional perioperative locations as the team expands.

This is a strong fit for an RN with experience in perioperative nursing, quality improvement, patient safety, Lean, Six Sigma, data analysis, Excel, metrics tracking, or process improvement. Operating Room experience is highly preferred, but candidates with strong quality, analytics, and improvement backgrounds in other clinical settings may also bring valuable perspective.

Why UVA Health

At UVA Health, perioperative nursing is practiced within an academic health system where clinical excellence, teaching, research, and innovation are deeply connected. For nurses who want to move beyond task-based quality work and into meaningful systems improvement, this role offers the opportunity to help shape how quality improvement is built, measured, and sustained across Perioperative Services.

UVA Health brings together the strengths of a major academic medical center, Magnet-recognized nursing, advanced surgical services, professional governance, nursing research, and a culture that supports nurses practicing at the top of their license. Within Perioperative Services, team members have access to a sophisticated surgical environment that includes Smart OR technology, robotics, integrated documentation, advanced communication tools, and a team-based approach to care.

What makes this opportunity especially compelling:

• A growth-oriented perioperative quality program with strong leadership support for expanding quality initiatives.

• A chance to help shape the future structure of perioperative quality improvement, not simply maintain existing processes.

• Close collaboration with CNS and CNL colleagues in a small, highly collaborative improvement team.

• Strong mentorship, coaching, and leadership support for continued growth and development.

• Professional development opportunities, including continuing education, evidence-based practice initiatives, and career advancement.

• Opportunities to publish, present, submit abstracts, and share quality improvement outcomes through venues such as AORN conferences and the UVA Evidence-Based Practice Symposium.

• National visibility for meaningful improvement work, with the ability to contribute to outcomes that may be shared beyond the local department.

• Work-life balance through flexible, supportive leadership and work-from-home opportunities.

Relocation assistance may be available for qualified candidates.

This is a career-building opportunity for a nurse who wants to influence care at the systems level while staying connected to the pace, complexity, and impact of perioperative practice. Your work will help improve performance where it matters most: in the surgical environment, alongside the teams delivering care, and in support of better outcomes for patients.