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Theatres Practitioners / Nurses
Working life
You’ll provide high standards of skilled care and support during each phase of a patient’s perioperative care. Theatre nurse in surgery, Perioperative care can be divided into four phases:
Roles and Duties
Theatre nurses can also specialise in a specific area such of perioperative care or rotate through the areas. Rotation is more likely to happen in day surgery.
Preoperative phase
During the preoperative assessment, you’ll make sure a patient is fully informed about the risks and benefits of the operation and that that they are in a good state of health for surgery. You’ll provide information about the operation and give the patient the opportunity to ask questions. This also reduces the risk of a late cancellation and resources being wasted.
Anaesthetic phase
During this phase, you’ll primarily support the anaesthetist but also prepare any specialist equipment, devices and drugs. You’ll also assess the patient immediately prior to the surgery.
Surgical phase
You’ll be responsible for a number of roles during the surgical phase including:
Recovery phase
Following the operation, you’ll:
Where will I work?
You’ll work primarily within hospital operating theatres and anaesthetic/recovery areas. You may also be involved with procedures on wards, clinics or in other specialist areas such as cardiac catheterisation units.
You’ll work as part of a large team that will include surgeons, anaesthetists, operating department practitioner (ODPs), theatre support workers and porters.
You may also work with healthcare scientists such as audiologists or cardiac physiologists when fitting cochlear implants or pacemakers.
Entry requirements
You’ll need to be a registered adult, child, mental health or learning disability nurse to work as a theatre nurse. After a period of induction you will undertake specialist training including courses to consolidate the specialist skills you’ll require to work in theatre.