Surgery Observation?

If you want to see surgery, you can go at it via the surgeons, or via the nurses. (I think if you try to go through anesthesia, they will be more interested in showing you their machines and other stuff on their side of the curtain. Just my experience, YMMV.)

They don't teach OR nursing in nursing school. It is such a specialized area of nursing, and it is generally learned on the job, through extended orientation periods that can easily last 6+ months. So, to even get anyone who knows what it is that goes on down in the OR, lots of nursing students and new hires come down for observation experiences.

If you want to see surgery up close and personal, one thing you can do is express interest in OR nursing. Call the local hospitals, get the names and email addresses or phone numbers of the OR directors or the RN educators for the OR. Write to them (preferably) or call, and express your interest in OR nursing/scrubbing. Tell them that you are considering career options (not untrue!) and that you'd like to shadow a scrub or circulator for a day. You may be pleasantly surprised at how much you can get just by asking nicely.

You may have to meet some requirements for the hospital, with regard to vaccinations, TB testing, and/or clearances. But once that paperwork is squared away, you can almost certainly find opportunities to shadow.

EDIT: How close you can get and what you can do depends a lot on the staff actually in the room that day. You will probably not be allowed to scrub in and stand actually at the table... there may just not be room for that. But I always made a point of getting students / shadowers up on a standing stool by anesthesia, or else at the foot, so that they could see the incision. I'd also try to narrate for them what they were seeing, why we took certain kinds of precautions, what various kinds of instruments were called and why they were used. There are some OR nurses who were more likely to put you in a corner and tell you not to touch anything, but hopefully, if you communicate well about what you are hoping to accomplish with your shadowing experience, the OR educator or director won't put you in with one of the grumpy nurses.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at http://ift.tt/jcXqJW.

Surgery Observation?