Operating Room Registered Nurse, Thomas Jefferson Univ Hospital

>> Katie: Hi. My name's Katie Wong, and I'm an operating room nurse. I mean basically you're a registered nurse just like the rest of the nurses that work on a normal floor, but you assist the anesthesiologists and surgeons in performing surgery in the operating room. You can assist on a total knee replacement, a kidney transplant, spine surgery. Working in a big university hospital, technically we are open 24/7, definitely for emergencies and anything like that, but normally the biggest business is during the week Monday through Friday, during normal business hours, 7 to 3, 7 to 5, that kind of time. So there are different shifts. You can have a day shift from 7 to 3, 7 to 5. You could do 12 hours, 7 to 7, and then people come in in the evening and the afternoon and then people work at night. It's just that at night and in the evening we perform less surgeries because it's the unscheduled surgeries that we're really doing. So you come in and get changed because they supply you with their own scrubs that they specifically clean that you wear in the operating room. You go up to the charge desk and check with them. They actually put up a sheet of assignments. Each room has a scrub nurse and a circulating nurse. So you have 2 nurses in each room, and you get your assignment starting whenever your shift starts, and then after that procedure is over, if there's another scheduled one to go, you just keep going, stay in that one room, and if that room is done with all it's schedule cases, then you check in with the charge nurse, and she tells you if you have another assignment. I really like having one patient at a time. It's not like working on the floor where you could have 5, 6, 7 patients. I will always have 1 patient at a time, which is really nice. You can focus on the one patient. I also really like working with a team. In the room you... in the operating room you have, you know, the scrub nurse and the circulating nurse and however many surgeons are working at the same time. You have the anesthesia team, and you're all in one room working together for the same patient, and it's nice to have that dynamic of having all aspects of the care team together at the same time. I mean, we have a defined role technically, but, you know, it kind of gets blurred if you're trying to help each other out, you know, doing teamwork, making sure that everything gets done for the patient and that one person doesn't get overloaded, and sometimes you just get overloaded. Even though you only have one patient at a time, like they may be asking for 10 different things, and you... prioritization is a really big deal. You have to make sure that you're kind of deciding what's the best thing to do right now and the things that can get done later. You can, I think you can go and get an associate's, but I think it's highly suggested now that you go and get an associate bachelor's, and then you take your boards to become a registered nurse, and then some people will work on a floor for a while or, you know, do something else as an RN to gain some kind of critical care experience and then go into the OR. I actually went straight from school to the OR and they have programs that, now, they're about 6 months long, and it's basically on the job training. So you come in like usually to a big university hospital and they have a group of people who are not experienced as OR nurses, and they train you on sterility and instruments and different procedures, and they have a lot of classroom time and of hands on experience with the instruments and all the equipment, and then you start seeing patients, and you have mentors with you that you follow, and they teach you all the procedures and that kind of stuff so that you kind of get a good base. I graduated from Villanova University, and I actually started going to Villanova thinking that I wanted to be a social worker. So I did that for about a year and a half, and then I was taking in my advanced history elective, and it was "History of American Medicine." I got really into it, and we actually took a trip to the modern museum here in Philadelphia, and I guess I always thought that kind of thing was really interesting, but after going there and we had to do a paper based on something there, I got really into researching obstetric and GYN surgeries, and I got into that over the summer after my sophomore year and decided I wanted to switch into nursing. So I actually ended up staying at Villanova for an extra year to... because it's a very strict schedule of classes. So I stayed for an extra year, finished with my Bachelor's, and then I went straight into the OR. Right out of college, I went back home down to Baltimore, and I worked at University of Maryland for 2 years. They had a really good program for the OR, and then I ended up coming back to Philadelphia because my fiance lives here, and Jefferson actually also has a really good program for beginning OR nurses, but I came here because it was, you know, a big university hospital, level one trauma, there's a lot of stuff going on, and it's still kind of the beginning of my career. So I wanted to stick with a place that had a lot going on, and everyone's learning here. You know, everyone's at a different level of learning. So that makes every day interesting. My advice would be to go out and look at as many possibilities as possible as far as nursing has, you know, there are so many different ways you can go with it. Go find a nurse in a field that you're interested in and just follow them around for a day. Any time they're, you know, if you're in nursing school, any time there's an opportunity to go observe someone, you know, make sure that you get as much out of it as possible, and because you can't really know what it's like until you're really standing there with them.