Operating Room Nurses- A Fulfilling Nursing Career PathPosted: April 02, 2009

As an operating room nurse, you have to provide specialized nursing services to critically ill and the mentally disturbed patients and promote physical and mental health within the medical treatment facility. The Operating Room nurse is basically responsible for assisting the doctors in preparing patients and in the operating rooms for surgery. It calls for preparation and maintaining of sterile medical supplies and helping with preoperative and postoperative procedures. You need to be prepared to treat emergency cases without getting perturbed and with a lot of patience. The patient's medical history needs to be examined along with his records while conducting basic duties like taking temperature, pulse and blood pressure.

There are plenty of options also available in the operating nurse career such circulating nurse in the operating room and anesthesia care nursing. Nurses who provide anesthesia have to have least two years of critical care experience and should have completed the course from a nurse anesthesia school for training. Circulating nurses are responsible for everyone in the operating room on any particular day. They are responsible as patient spokesman ensuring that the patient being operated on is the correct patient and that the doctor is performing the correct procedure.

Nurses have many career opportunities available to them when they complete an AOC qualifying course in operating room nursing or one year of supervised training in operating room nursing. The patients undergoing surgery come completely under the care of the nurses attending the operating theater. Their duties start with preparing and ensuring that the operating theater is ready for the operating procedures and seeing to it that all the equipments and special procedures that are to be done before any operation are all taken care off. Regular

procedures and emergencies, if any. They are also responsible for all the equipments while the operation is under progress and they need to ensure all the necessary tools are kept ready depending on the operation that is to take place.

Summary:

Operating room nurses, are also referred to as preoperative nurses, are usually qualified and registered nurses who work in co ordination with patients who are to be operated upon. In today's world, nursing jobs are in demand in hospitals, different types of clinics and surgical units that operate during the day. In hospitals, their work is to interact directly with patients before the operation during the operation and post the operation.

The operating room nurses position in the operating theater is very crucial as the entire operating procedure depends on her efficiency and job knowledge as they almost operate as secondary physicians in all respects. Infact half the job like suturing the patients after the surgery and controlling the bleeding is an important part of a operating nurses job. These nurses play the role of mediators and need to keep the patients informed about the upcoming surgery and give them post surgical advice as well. Assisting them and changing the dressing when necessary. The Operating Room Nurse works under the direction of the Manager while carrying out nursing responsibilities and duties.

The OR Nurse also manages operating room activities like taking control of OR personnel and making sure they have completed their routine checks and given responsibilities, which could be anything from ensuring the equipments, are sterilized to keeping records and relevant documents updated. Other responsibilities include maintaining correct and complete records and reports, and helping with ongoing, in house training programs by continually

updating already advanced knowledge and responsibilities of nursing personnel.

Reaction:

As of now plenty of nursing jobs are available in the world today. Scrub nurses duty is to hand the medical instruments to the operating doctor during surgery while the circulating nurse observes checks and monitors all the equipments during the operation and ensures that they run smoothly. The nurses whose duty is in the operating theater are responsible to ensure that the operating room is ready in all respects for the operating procedure. This would mean making sure, all the equipments are properly audited and the patient's record is recorded in detail. The consent form is to be filled by the concerned family before the operation begins.

As an operating nurse, he/she must me competent and be always alert and ready whenever a operation is on going on especially the scrub nurse and the circulating nurse because one mistake can be a threat to the health of the patient. As a scrub nurse he/she must comply to the doctor with accurate and correct instrument to be given to the doctor and the nurse must be alert so that the operation will be easy and smoothly done and the doctor will not be stressed when doing an operation. The circulating nurse must also be alert because he/she must assist and count correctly the instruments that are being used in the operation.

If the nurse and the doctor work correctly and accurately the operation will be done easily and less stress to the patient and to the nurses and doctors that will assist to the operation.