RE: Roles of a Theatre, Circulating & Hospital Nurse?

steph fursland — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 20:28:04 GMT

Depends a bit on how you set up the rest of your day - my practice has two branches and this is how we organise it:

1 vet, two nurses - early nurse and the vet both consult from 9-11. Late nurse gets in at 11, takes over nurse consults, while the vet and the early nurse do the first procedure of the day. Early nurse recovers that patient while vet and late nurse do next procedure. When both procedures are finished, both nurses clean up prep/theatre, pack kits (depending on time) and discharge the patients. Both nurses share care of inpatients (big whiteboard in prep so meds/obs due can be easily seen). Early nurse goes home at 4.30, late nurse finishes cleaning, packing kits, cleans vet consult rooms.

Other branch - two vets, three nurses (early, late, middle). One nurse allocated to each vet and so will do their ops with them, recover their patients, clean theatre after the procedure etc. There's no spare room for nurses to consult in this branch, so nurse consults happen when ops are going on so they can use the vets' consult rooms (11-3). In this branch there isn't really a defined role for each nurse - I think 'officially' there is (early nurse operates with vet 1, middle nurse consults and does inpatients, etc), but what happens in practice is that the three of them kind of work it out amongst themselves who will do what (our nursing team has worked together for ages so they're pretty seamless at this!) Obviously because everyone works a late, and early and a middle during the week, it sort of evens out and everyone does a bit of everything in the end. We do have sheets with all the daily jobs on for people to check when they get a minute, so that things like sending the order, putting the Idexx samples out etc don't get forgotten.

If your nursing staff is changing, maybe all sit down with a list of the jobs that need doing and when, and each come up with a suggested division of labour? (rotate the roles so there isn't a temptation to load all the rubbish jobs on one person!)

RE: Roles of a Theatre, Circulating & Hospital Nurse?

Nicola Smith — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 20:21:47 GMT

We have theatre 1 nurse - main ops nurse in theatre. Theatre 2 nurse assisting theatre 1 nurse where needed, recovering patients, preparing for next patient and doing premed ready and tidying as we go, kits if time. When ops finish both theatre nurses responsible for theatre cleaning and kits. Hope that helps!!