Can continuing education actually reduce perioperative risk? In discussions among quite a few hospital managers, this question is often simplified to "whether to hold classes or not." But at the intersection of the clinical front line and teaching organizations, the answer often depends on something else: whether education can be strung together with quality and with patient outcomes through a set of replicable and reviewable indicator systems. Chen Haiyan's years of research and practice provide methodology and data evidence precisely on this tensor.

Industry trends take the lead. Governance logic oriented to quality and outcomes is pushing nursing to include "systematizing training, standardizing processes, and making indicators traceable" into hard-edged construction; especially in perioperative and critical-care scenarios, where experience is hard to transfer and differences are easily amplified, institutions are forced to connect competency models and quality improvement to routine operations. The relevant background judgments and governance approaches have already become a consensus in multiple industry assessments and at the hospital level in practice.

For patients entering the ICU after radical esophagectomy, a study published in American Journal of Translational Research included 155 participants (control group, 77 cases; observation group, 78 cases). The control group received routine nursing, while the observation group implemented "high-quality nursing," with VAS pain, clinically related indicators, adverse events, SAS/SDS emotional scores, discharge satisfaction, and SF-36 used as the main observation endpoints. The results showed that, compared with the control group, the high-quality nursing group had significantly shorter durations on temporal indicators such as indwelling time of drainage tubes, time to get out of bed, recovery of bowel sounds, and length of hospital stay; a lower incidence of adverse events; and more pronounced decreases in VAS, SAS, and SDS. Three months after surgery, scores in quality-of-life dimensions such as GH, MH, RP, RE, and VT were higher. The study concluded that, in this population and context, high-quality nursing can reduce pain and adverse events and promote recovery. The article also expands on key nursing points, involving psychological/analgesic interventions, airway and incision care, as well as nutrition and respiratory function care (with paired presentation of procedural practices and outcome indicators). The paper has been included on the NIH PMC platform and in mainstream domestic academic databases; key data and methods can be publicly retrieved and reused, providing a foundation for cross-institutional validation.

A meta-analysis published in the Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery systematically searched for and included 14 original studies (total sample size 13,286), adopted a random-effects model, and summarized results using odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval, identifying several risk factors associated with postoperative delirium in cardiac surgery, including increasing age, diabetes, preoperative depression, mild cognitive impairment, carotid stenosis, NYHA class III–IV, duration of mechanical ventilation, and ICU length of stay, while identifying left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF%) as a protective factor. The authors structured the risk factors by preoperative/intraoperative/postoperative and pointed out that this quantitative information helps to identify high-risk patients in advance and facilitates clinical advance preparations.

If papers provide "evidence templates," then textbooks and teaching works assume the role of "transfer tools." Chen Haiyan served as chief editor of Commonly Used Clinical Nursing Techniques in Surgery, and contributed psychology-related chapters to Instructional Textbook of Clinical Practice for Medical Students; the two books were released respectively by Jilin Science and Technology Press and Science Press, targeting high-frequency clinical scenarios, solidifying technical key points and risk identification into teachable and assessable knowledge units, so as to facilitate rapid implementation in in-hospital training.

Why is this a key increment for the nursing industry? Because the perioperative period is a scenario that is "time-sensitive, process-complex, and intensive in professional collaboration," and any tiny change at any node may be amplified into a difference in outcomes. Binding continuing education with quality governance and aligning processes with competencies can reduce the interface loss among "people—process—equipment"; when indicators are trackable and after-action reviews can be carried out, improvement then shifts from "individual experience" to "organizational capability."

From the perspective of industry trends, the nursing agenda toward 2030 elevates training and organizational capacity building to the system level: on the one hand emphasizing docking with goals such as health equity and population health; on the other hand promoting deep integration between in-hospital continuing education and practice pathways. These directional initiatives also provide policy and methodological support for the path of "training-driven quality."

Therefore, clinical research is not the end point but the starting point of governance. Taking as examples the postoperative ICU study on esophageal cancer and the meta-analysis on postoperative delirium, the former tells us "how to convert nursing interventions into verifiable outcome indicators," while the latter provides the evidentiary coordinates for "how to conduct risk stratification and early management." Introducing both types of evidence into curriculum structures and preceptorship processes is equivalent to implanting an engine for in-hospital quality improvement that is "replicable—assessable—disseminable."

Of course, systematization does not mean "offering a few more courses." What truly matters is designing training by back-calculating from quality indicators: constructing learning units and contextualized drills around key indicators such as error rate, complication incidence, and pathway compliance rate; on this basis forming standard operations, preceptorship evaluation, and data dashboards, so that continuous improvement becomes routine operation rather than project-style "blitz." Such approaches are being strengthened in the governance practices of many institutions and in industry discussions.

When evidence is systematized, external impact expands accordingly. Using the retrievability of open databases as a handle, academic outputs are more readily called upon by the clinical front line; using the structuring of textbooks and teaching chapters as a medium, methods can diffuse along the training chain; the two superimposed form a closed loop of "research generates knowledge—teaching solidifies capability—clinical practice verifies effectiveness—feeds back into research," reducing the contingency of improvement.

From a broader perspective, the value of nursing lies not only in the ward but also in the system. High-risk scenarios represented by the perioperative period are often the "touchstone" of hospital quality management. When a validated intervention-and-evaluation framework can migrate across disease types and departments, it will produce compound effects on regional healthcare, on the allocation of training resources, and even on the improvement of patient experience.

Chen Haiyan's work happens to form a considerable "methodological dividend" at this intersection: on one end connecting paper-level evidence-based research, and on the other end connecting textbook-level structured outputs, with in-hospital training in the middle converting evidence into competencies and process inertia. For the industry, this convergence of "evidence—teaching—quality" provides a practical sample that can be invoked by different institutions.

When the debate returns to the origin—"Is continuing education effective?"—the more meaningful follow-up question may be "What makes education effective." The answer does not lie in any single lecture, but in the long-term accumulation of evidence and the operation of the system: research gives direction, textbooks precipitate methods, training shapes outcomes, and databases undertake verification. By this path, the improvement of perioperative safety and patient outcomes thereby gains a stable and reliable handle.